Heretic Psalms is going on an indefinite hiatus.

Thanks to everyone who read my work these past six months. I’ve loved writing these, and I still have quite a number of ideas in the drafts folder, but realistically, my novel comes first. Time is fleeting and grows more fleeting still.

Since starting this blog in August 2025, I’ve written about 40k words for the main posts: a long novella or short novel.

When I started Heretic Psalms, I still wrestled greatly with theological turmoil, but writing has greatly settled me. I don’t 100% know what I believe in the aftermath, but I feel 100% calmer about not knowing.

One day I may complete those drafts and explore what I still want to explore, but for the meantime, I will leave this archive up for others to potentially discover.

I can always count on The Lonesome Crowded West – the second LP from indie rockers Modest Mouse – to bolster my faith in humanity. It’s like: if a 22 year old meth-head can make THIS, what THE FUCK have we been holding ourselves back from?

[I’ll wait for you to listen to the album and immediately take a six month cross-country vision quest, glimpse your raven-headed self, and return to this article cozy once more, curled with a steaming cup of tea]

I knew of (and liked) Modest Mouse since primordial times but didn’t really discover them until my German-days, where I worked in a food warehouse: the kind of place staffed by sad, tired foreigners given no public holidays. German Unity Day it may have been, but in the warehouse, it was still the DDR. And I don’t mean Dance, Dance, Revolution . .

Telling the labor-conscious Deutsche about [Name of Food Warehouse] consistently merited looks of sympathetic aversion, as if I confessed to shaving the pubic hair of mental patients for a living or scrubbing bed pans with my own toothbrush.

But it wasn’t ALL bad. Because of significant supply chain issues, I got fridges-full of feta/squash salads, blueberry muffins, spaetzle, asparagus, edamame, black lentils, pastrami, mochi, Ben and Jerry’s, sushi. Shit I hadn’t heard of, shit I hadn’t tried yet.

I felt like the Trash King of Frankfurt. Half of what I ate had fallen from a truck.

And to be fair, management did supply free Red Bull. “Management” being a 6 foot, Slavic toddler (the kind of guy who spent his shifts putting ice-cubes down people’s shirts and barking Albanian into a mega-phone) and a Lebanese cokehead with serious pinky-nails and the propensity to stare through you like he’s looking for someone in a crowd.

Under their noble aegis, I dashed through the warehouse with a dark purpose. And like a vampire craving an end to the pathetic shadow of my existence, felt [Name of Food Warehouse] stretch and stretch my sense of time until it became unbearable. I finally understood Hegel – and has anyone ever understood Hegel? – when he said: “Geist1 must travel through the slaughter bench of history.”

During these times – and with the restraint of a free Spotify account – I demanded music that could be tolerably shuffled [like a junky demands the needle], and Modest Mouse fit the bill perfectly, for all sorts of reasons:

• Lead singer Isaac Brock’s blue-collar genius

• Jeremiah Green’s insane drumming

• The sense of an energy so vast, it required a continent to spill over

• Jagged, propulsive guitar work

• The unique vocal cadence that comes from traveling alone

• Brock’s intriguing push-and-pull between militant atheism and profound mysticism.

All this form-fitted my restlessness, my desire (through the novel I was writing) to capture the madcap America of my dreams, and my sense that travel, even as it deranged, would certainly also reveal.

I saw Modest Mouse in Cologne that year during the 25th anniversary tour of Lonesome Crowded West: Jeremiah Green’s last before dying of bone cancer.2

The experience melted me away.

Here’s an actual picture of me afterwards:

Modest Mouse kept me moving forward, out and over the continent and back to the goddamn U.S. of A, the land of unlimited refills and free sauce packets3.

Towards the end of my German-days, I dreamt my own heart attack in the warehouse, and in response, they hosted my funeral as a pay-per-view live stream, telling the public that, since I died on a Monday, I had to make up the rest of my hours somehow.

By this point, we were supposedly the 3rd most profitable of their locations in Germany, probably because, you know, only like five people still worked there.

When I resigned, the Lebanese cokehead clutched his ribcage and started crying, telling me “how fucked up everything was” and how “he wished he never came here,” shaking my hand and pulling me into an awkward hug.

But even though I left all that behind me, I never left Modest Mouse. There’s a reason I submitted and published “Isaac Brock, the Unreliable Narrator: Holy Fury in Modest Mouse’s “Cowboy Dan”4 in Deutschland. Set free from the comforts of home – and given immense time to travel alone and think – the Christianity I had so easily left in the US became an avenging angel: one I haven’t stopped grappling with to this day.

But I’ve found peace in the sport of it, sometimes even achieving a superposition of views without collapsing one way or the other: Christian/atheist/Buddhist/Taoist [I did say there’s a compound noun for every season, after all].

I see this superposition in Modest Mouse and perhaps, if I can pull it off, the ideal song to discuss the concept: the last track on the towering Lonesome Crowded West.

The Song, “Styrofoam Boots/It’s All Nice on Ice”

Most people I meet – when I finally crawl from my belltower and actually meet them – seem to know Modest Mouse exclusively through “Float On.” From radio play, commercials, sports, its top Spotify placement – etc. If they’re decrepit millennials stairlifting up to their pill-sorters, maybe even from Rock Band 2.

I love “Float On,” but it hardly represents Modest Mouse. In fact, Brock created the song specifically “to feel good for a day” after the death of a close friend and the brutal Good News for People Who Like Bad News sessions. So let’s revel in that positivity for a moment.

[and imagine Isaac Brock stoned, seeing himself eating a hot dog on a jumbotron as this blares over a Portland Trail Blazers game]

That was fun. But it was most definitely not The Lonesome Crowded West.

Which of course, having finished your six-month vision quest and Fear-and-Loathing-in-Las-Vegas-trunk of goodies, you already know the album contrasts less with its negativity and MORE with its non-commercial intensity and song structures. I mean, the first song opens with a shout, declaring a claustrophobia bigger than the world.

From the top of the ocean, yeah
From the bottom of the sky, goddamn
Well, I get claustrophobic
I can, you know that I can, well

- Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine

Like Nirvana, the band mastered loud-soft songwriting, carving out their own idiom in the process. Not necessarily weirder than Kurt’s [not when “Drain You” exists] – but certainly unique, something newly weird under the sun. One can easily grasp why they distanced themselves from the Seattle grunge scene and emphasized the whole “Issaquah, Washington” thing, despite Google Maps telling a different story.

This separation certainly fits the album themes though. Crowding. Urban decay. The bloody-nose, eyes-dilated need to GET OUT and find something for yourself.

Which, they did.

Both literally and figuratively in Lonesome Crowded West: a 70 minute odyssey of dying strip malls and Cormac McCarthy cowboys and Denali-sharp peaks of angst. Its the perfect vessel for Brock to vent his hippy-cult-upbringing – this travelogue for the insane (or soon to be insane); this perfect merging of the personal and visionary.

“Styrofoam Boots” closes all that, and like all great closers, completes the album while launching into new forms. To this day, I’ve heard few (to no) songs like it – with its folky register, speed-freak lyric delivery, and its four minute outro, “It’s All Nice on Ice” [“ice,” heheh wink],5 which turns a prominent drum solo and chanting into conceptual perfection.6 Even when Modest Mouse returned to folksy elements, like the banjo heavy “Bukowski,” they never approached “Styrofoam Boots” again.

Except, now that I think about it, they did approach its message. Like “Float On,” “Styrofoam Boots” tells you that Everything Will Be OKAY. You’re not gonna sink buddy.

You’re just going to drown like Christ.

[Verse 1]

Well, all's not well but I'm told that it'll all be quite nice
You'll be drowned in boots like mafia
But your feet will still float like Christ's

Yes, the opening verse of “Styrofoam Boots” depicts a truly unique vision of “walking” on water by drowning upside down [in oddly-specific, buoyant footwear]. The kinda thing you have to hear to believe – and also, a great mystery: what substance produced such a quaint and curious vision? Perhaps some day I’ll know.

[Verse 1 continued]

Well, I'll be damned
They were right
I'm drowning upside down
My feet afloat like Christ's
I'm in heaven trying to figure out which stack
They're going to stuff us Atheists into
And Peter and his monkey laugh and I'll laugh with them
I'm not sure what at
They point and say:
"We'll keep you in the back,"
Polishing halos, baking manna and gas

Claustrophobia. Urban decay. The bloody-nose, eyes-dilated need to GET OUT and find something for yourself. Chase that across 70 minutes of indie rock, and you’ll still find yourself – and your past. Isaac can flee his cult upbringing but still wind up dead in heaven, working a shitty kitchen job like he had on earth.

[Honestly, pretty funny in its own way].

And then comes Jesus:

[Verse 2]
Well, some guy comes in looking a bit like everyone I ever seen
He moves just like Crisco disco
Breathin’ a hundred percent Listerine
He says looking at something else but directing everything to me
“Any time anyone gets on their knees to pray
Well, it makes my telephone ring” and I’ll be damned
He said, “You were right, no one’s running this whole thing.”

He had a theory too.

[Chorus]
He said that God takes care of himself, God takes care of himself
And you of you

Here we have the shifty son of man, looking like a pastiche of all the down-and-outs Isaac knew, getting hammered on 54 proof mouth wash.7 Not a flattering picture, but A picture nonetheless, one with a literal Jesus on the end of the line (in his minty cups or not). Except even THAT GUY doesn’t know the ultimate answer, the powers that hold together the universe.

One might respond with relief or dread at the prospect – or just not think about it.

Isaac opts for the latter, and the drums kick in [drums now buzzing with Jeremiah-ghostliness].

It’s all nice, it’s all nice
It’s all nice on ice, alright
It’s all nice, it’s all nice
It’s all nice on ice (On ice)
(On ice)

And so on for a few minutes, as if Isaac just skates into the frozen distance: peaceful or willfully ignorant or both. Cause you know, it’s all nice on ice, speed, meth, chalk, crystal, rock, magic, crank. It’s also nice walking on ice, avoiding death and the collapse into mystic realms. Through the marvel of chemistry and water’s unique density, everyone, not just Jesus of Nazareth, can walk on water.

And also like Christ, Isaac is executed by an illicit authority. The empire in Christ’s case, the mafia in Isaac’s. There’s something here. Between his drowning in “Styrofoam Boots” and his walking-on-water in “It’s All Nice, on Ice,” Isaac verges on (and maybe even participates in) Christ-reality. But that’s a musing for another time.

Right now, we’re discussing the “superposition.”

But first, a caveat –

I’m no physicist. The last math class I took was pre-calculus, where we browbeat the rooky teacher into giving us pizza parties every week.

But from my meager understanding, the superposition is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics: demonstrated in the above experiment, where a particle is fired through two slits. When unobserved, their travel remains indetermined (aka. they pass through both openings); however, observation “snaps” them into one opening or the other, leading to the mind-blowing thesis that particles exist in multiple states (different directions of spin, different places) but only “collapse” into one or the other when observed. What this says about the mind, we can only begin to fathom. Some like biologist Adam Lanza posit the primacy of mind from this observation. But I’m using the term “superposition” loosely.

Can one be a Christian and atheist simultaneously? A Christian and Taoist? All three? Christian and Pagan? Can one maintain the potential for both, “collapsing” into one or the other as the situation demands?

Within the seven minutes of the song, Isaac exists both on top of the ice and drowning underneath it: in both familiar reality and the ultra-spiritual. Only a thin crust separates these options, with a theoretical “collapse” always possible.

Isaac denounces religion – and yet, spirituality remains a vital part of his imagination and means of expression.

Systems often demand a binary: you assent to a series of propositions, or you don’t. You reject other options, or you don’t. However, I don’t think the human mind (or reality) actually works that way. Like Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes.

And as 21st century humans, we no longer live within the dominion of a metanarrative. We live in narrative plurality. We cannot look with certainty upon much of anything. And even if we feel we can, we maintain the distinction between theory and explanation. Like Christ in “Styrofoam Boots,” we’re not sure who’s running this thing.

Materialism explains a lot – but has immense cracks that many fall through, like, IDK, any plausible explanation for mind. Spiritualism appeals to humanity’s innermost inclinations – yet cannot answer much of anything. With the privilege of deciding one’s worldview comes the awareness of every side’s shortcomings.

We live in a profoundly anxious age, with everything once fixed shaken loose. Once you lose a metanarrative, how do you ever get it back? How can you possibly believe in one again? We know more about our faith systems than almost anyone in history – and yet struggle to enact their dramas.

But we also have a profound opportunity.

Raised within a worldview, you can never really cut it out of you, but you can add to it. Almost no one in history had this sort of freedom. Like Wallace Stevens in “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” you can be of three minds. Or four or five.

Perhaps this is never fully sustainable, but perhaps the dialogue (and tension) between modes will produce new thought, new ways of being.

And regardless, it’s where we are.

We live between the withdrawal of the old world and the dawning of the new one. And rather than pity ourselves, we can revel in our liminal existence. For us, God can be alive and dead, and we can understand the beauty and terror of each.

We can skate on the surface of the bottomless depths, a part (and separate) from both – but only if we develop conversational capacity and bravery and grace.

The certainty once given, when lost, becomes the task of a lifetime. But we will be better for learning and building. I believe that. I believe I already am.

Alright, I’m honestly not sure which will be more controversial:

• that I used "they/them” pronouns for God

• that I prefer Iron and Wine’s version of “Such Great Heights” over the Postal Service original

But what can I say? Jimmy Tamborello smothered the original under cheap electronic drums.1 We tend to prefer the version we heard first, and Iron and Wine found me vulnerable and in desperate need of its beauty: my year in Germany.

Beer and Bread Land – Busch Gardens the Continent – where everything was too small for a corn-fed American such as meself.

See, “Moving to Germany” had squatted in my brain for years, sedate and ignorable, until one day it stormed the cockpit and flew me there. ‘So much in the natural world exists only as potential.’ The squatter assured me, poking me on the chest as my hijacked life crossed the Atlantic. ‘Without controlled heat and alloying elements, iron ore never becomes steel.’ It said, plunging a syringe into my ego and watching it slump on the pilot’s seat. ‘So much exists in YOU only as tiny-little-iron-ore lumps, and YOU should change that.’

My first night, I slept above the “Fetisch und Erotikladen.”

I shuffled the streets like a squawking dodo: something only pity could keep from extinction. [Okay, I’m referencing my own poem, sue me]. My only friends were my horny Malaysian landlord and my Taiwanese roommate, who spricht kein Englisch. Before I could even offer my travels as a fragrant sacrifice to The Gram, I had to settle my existence with Germany’s Ausländerbehörde (the immigration bureau) and became a Kafka fan overnight.

I experienced poverty for the first time (not just the romantic poverty of undergrad), and like a London street-urchin, I mouth-breathed outside H&M, snowflakes in my hair. I Grinched among Who-ville and their endless Weihnachtsmärkte (Christmas markets), filled with pork-buns and cauldrons of wine. I cursed my pockets as I passed the Kebab house and some busker played a decrepit, off-key version of "Blowin' in the Wind" beside his empty guitar case.

It was around this time that I REALLY dug into my iPod library. [If it isn’t clear already, the iPod for me is like typewriters and coffee pots to the Beats].

“Such Great Heights” – with its longing for a distant other, its commentary on idealization at a distance, its condemnation of technology’s ability to replicate true contact – hit me square between my immigrant eyes.

A generation encountered The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie during their peak teen or pre-teen years, and despite missing that boat, my German time really felt like being 19 again, in all the best and worst ways.2

Becoming an adult, I froze so much of myself just to function, but living overseas did nothing but thaw my longings. For romance. For God. For the train roof to peel back, and something to show its face.

American Christianity does not speak much of romance and romantic yearning. Outside of clunkers like “heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss” – and the are-they-talking-about-Jesus-or-a-girl trope, which I might call “hot for Jesus”3 – Christians tend to divinize agape and denigrate eros. Agape is God; eros is, well, eros is some freaky shit.

And it’s true; gone awry, eros stirs us to nothing less than homicide and death. Yet Church fathers no less luminous than Gregory of Nyssa spoke of a divine eros: of the soul’s yearning for unification with the One. Eros, according to the neo-platonic tradition, pushes the soul beyond intellect and out to infinite beauty and goodness.

I guess I’m saying – Erotica just ain’t what it used to be.

But we can still find erotic tatters in songs like “Such Great Heights:” where human yearning points to the divine, even in our post-belief age. I want to discuss this longing today: how the Christian world has neglected it – and for that matter, the divine feminine – to its detriment.

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The Song, “Such Great Heights”

I am thinking it's a sign
That the freckles in our eyes
Are mirror images
And when we kiss, they're perfectly aligned
And I have to speculate
That God himself did make
Us into corresponding shapes
Like puzzle pieces from the clay

- The Postal Service, Such Great Heights

Having spent my tender Sunday mornings in front of a flannelgraph, I can’t possibly hear “puzzle pieces from the clay” without my hound-dog-ears sticking way-the-fuck-up – especially when couched in such gorgeous sentiment.

But you don’t need to drain your skull cavity of cerebrospinal fluid and replace it with the Bible to recognize Eden when you hear it: that story where the deity play-doughs a golem for his garden, finds it alone, and to ameliorate the situation, knocks him out and play-doughs a creature’s helper. Much preferable to the Egyptian creation myth, where Atum the divine spluges out humans during a primordial wank.

Of course, to find the creature’s helper, Gibbard doesn’t mention how Yahweh fumbles through creating every possible animal to get there,4 nor how the man determined the animals unfit. [But considering the story is about finding a wife, we can only speculate . . .].5

But procedure aside, Adam ends up with the only possible being for him: an equal who fits like a puzzle. And puzzles don’t just click together; they create a beautiful picture. Anyone in love could grant Ben Gibbard’s musings about romantic fate, even if, like him, they immediately doubt it – or like me, talk flippantly about it.

And true, it may seem like a stretch
But it's thoughts like this that catch
My troubled head when you're away
When I am missing you to death

For the sober, matching nevi are not autographs pointing to a divine order, but the court of love has always held a different standard of evidence. Eros doesn’t just rocket us into the divine; it turns us into junkies combing the carpet for chalk, scouring our lives for heaven’s scraps.

I mean, I get it. Like Ben, my longings are Adam-shaped. [Not “Atum-shaped” :P]. And if Gibbard and his partner cast themselves as Adam and Eve – from their great heights of deluded fancy – then they aren’t just “made for each other” as corresponding shapes, they’re feeling emotions no one has ever felt. They’re originals.

And doesn’t love make us all feel original?6

Personally though, I prefer Aristophanes’ version in Plato’s symposium, despite what can only be described as its body horror.

Unlike the Genesis myth, Aristophanes describes “circle people” who were once joined together but cleaved by a fretful Zeus because, idk, they could scurry fast or some shit. [Seriously, this design does not seem optimal, let alone a threat to the divine order!].

The “great heights” (that Ben and his partner wave from) reflect Zeus’s Tower-of-Babel-like fear of human romantic unity, which Aristophanes called “their ascent to heaven,” and which Ben’s peers actively dissuade.

They will see us waving from such great heights
"Come down now," they'll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
"Come down now," but we'll stay

If you’re not in love – love is terrifying. Madness. Barking at the moon from the top of a tree.

If you’re in love – it will melt you down, and you’ll never be the same. But you’ll find this so sublime, you’ll seek it at all costs.

So, where Eden falls silent, Aristophanes enriches our vocabulary of human longing. Separated, the two circle-halves forever seek each other – and the wholeness they originally had in each other. Could Adam, who had Eve custom-created the moment he felt a slight twinge of loneliness, possibly understand that longing? [A longing much better conveyed in the Iron and Wine cover ^_^].

Then again, the DAMN flannelgraph may have duped me, as the actual Hebrew reflects a division not unlike Aristophanes: with Genesis referring to the first human as “Ha’adam” (the same word applying to general humanity in Genesis 1:27) and only naming the male/husband “Ish” and female/wife “Ishshah” after Yahweh chopped that ass in half, like Obi-wan Kenobi.

So, we’re left with nuance.7 My favorite!

Both stories represent love as unification, with man and wife becoming “one flesh” in Genesis after separation. And when reunited, the circle people – who sting with exile from each other, rather than paradise – gain powers that make the gods tremble.

I love that Aristophanes acknowledges men/men and women/women pairings in his origin story [although with cultural baggage], but the Biblical account dignifies humanity far more substantially8 – although dignity of course might not be truth – with both men and women being in the image of God (vs. something Zeus keeps around to people his fulfillment center).9

It’s for this reason that I called God “they.” Well, reasons.

1. Both male and female are in the divine image

2. The trinity is a plurality, and a unity, but still a plurality [consider the grammatical intelligibility of “they communed together,” referring to the father, son, and holy ghost]

3. The church (a collective noun) is the bride of Christ, and the bride becomes “one flesh” with the groom (with somewhat disturbing implications there – but hey, I didn’t invent the metaphor)

But what about “God finding themselves?”

Well, that’s a little more complicated, but I believe we’re all part of God; that we came from God and will return to God – and that our lives, in the meantime, prepare us for God. The “bride of Christ,” after all, reflects original unity: with the "Ishshah” taken out of “Ha’adam” and later reunited with “Ish.”

Our lives, if they’re anything, are stories of separation. From the animal world. From the Good. From God. On the cross, even Christ intimates this separation of God from God. And when he descends into death and hell (WHERE TRADITION HOLDS, GOD IS NOT), he finalizes it. But in finalizing the separation only destroys it.

This is the myth of Christianity.

Maybe it’s true, maybe not.

Perhaps it’s true in heaven only.

Perhaps we must make it true.

But we’re left with our yearnings. Some for a divine masculine, some for a divine feminine, some for the ground of being that births all things. We see these in each other, and the glimpse drives us to great, mystic heights. And while this is pure speculation, I believe that we can find a divine masculine in church, but not a divine feminine (whereas various pagan strands can). Perhaps this has affected not just church attendance, but the character of worship itself.

Yeats demonstrates this longing well in the Song of Wandering Aengus:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and tides are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

This glimpse of the divine sent Yeats on a lifelong search that human love imitates and can never completely fill. In “Such Great Heights,” we see this longing for distant love transmuted into art: an experience evident on any radio station.

I tried my best to leave
This all on your machine
But the persistent beat
It sounded thin upon the sending

And that frankly will not fly
You’ll hear the shrillest highs
And lowest lows with the windows down
And this is guiding you home

Eros crosses – and destroys – distances. It cannot abide them. Eros aims for union. It makes us write quirky songs and blast our passion across the globe. It sends us back to each other, even if the song grows thin and the middle blasts out.

So, Agape is God – a love that passes selfishness and personal gain.

But Eros is God – the force that inspires us to seek, to create, and to change.

In a healthy, romantic love, we find a life-giving, life-generating wholeness that models how one might approach the divine. Granted, most of us do not have the spiritual sophistication of Rumi [a Sufi poet and mystic whose writing can only be discussed with enthusiasm]; the worship-romance wires get a bit crossed there.

But romance is atonement (at-one-ment) in miniature, if one can endure its crucible. Those “great heights” bring danger and ecstasy alike.

So – we should not freight romantic love with all our hopes for meaning and purpose and happiness. Life is not a romcom. Meet cute is not “meet my only reason for being.” But we shouldn’t make the opposite mistake either: of assuming that eros – and the romance that embodies it – has nothing to do with divinity.

Where else but God’s image should one find God? And where else but romance does that image shine clearest?

Last February – for the10th anniversary of the record – Sub Pop released the demos of I Love You, Honeybear: an album that remains noteworthy among 2010s releases, not just for its excellence, but for its extreme mixture of love and cynicism. To find music this tortured in its pop sentiments, actually, you’d have to harken back to John Lennon, and even he could talk about it without smothering it beneath a pillow of snark.1

Yes, like a Buddhist temple, our man Josh is thoroughly jaded. But for what it’s worth, I consider Honeybear the perfect album for the post-Christian era. Minus the divine, where does love fit in the evolutionary order? I don’t mean, can it exist, I mean, can it be anything other than just another survival technique? “An institution based on human frailty?” And if it is, why can’t we help ourselves from manically stacking silly love songs to the ceiling?

Not that survival is BAD, of course.

Wolfram here is definitely on Team Survival.

But there are lots of survival techniques – like dissolving a living creature after it laid its eggs inside you. Most of them do not inspire rapture.

Then again, it’s not just fatuous entertainers or Grandma’s embroidered couch pillow but another John who told us that God Is Love – a somewhat ludicrous claim if one has ever turned on Animal Planet.

But IF God is love, then naturally, whoever loves knows God and has God inside them, as the Revelator John told us. This is an experience requiring no formulated belief. It’s also an equals sign.

If God is love, then likewise, love is God.

[Love is real, real is love, to quote the Yeah, Yeah, Yeah John].

And SO, a defeat of love is a defeat of God.

Conversely, if one cannot reduce love to the material, then what’s left is . . . well, not God per say, but something supernatural at least.

Which – brings us back to Father John Misty. Joshua Tillman. Drummer on the Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues. The guy providing “additional drums” on Demon Hunter’s debut Christian metal album,2 only to later make a song called, “When the God of Love Returns, There’ll Be Hell to Pay.”

You can’t fake that kind of angst.

A former Pentecostal youth, Tillman – and his Nick Drake-esque early music career – were both dramatically altered by magic mushrooms, a sort of death-rebirth origin story culminating in the Father John Misty character: a bombastic folk singer/guru/hedonist/satirist. A figure that, no matter what, begs for comparisons.3

Post-transformation, Christianity remained an important subject for Misty: often far more seriously than that crucified Jon Arbuckle would suggest.4 He told Relevant magazine, for example, that Pure Comedy – an album so caustic, it’s like bathing in hydrochloric acid – was “a gospel record” that “only Christians would appreciate.” He later states, “Being someone who cannot get Christianity out of my system—I no longer even really want to—it’s an intimate thing to question God.”5

Which, I guess is what you do when you appear as a naughty baby on your album cover, clutching the virgin’s exposed teat.

Of course, these performative vandalisms divert attention from his serious critique of the religion (and his serious feelings). And for what it’s worth, I agree with him about questioning God. (Granted, I’m kind of biased).

For our purposes, the Relevant interview provides a framework to approach I Love You Honeybear, despite the article coming from the Pure Comedy era.

Honeybear, Father John Misty’s second album, finds Tillman crazed with love and at a crossroads. Fear Fun (2012) may have birthed the cynical, hilarious persona, but would the beauty and sincerity of his love for Emma Garr – the photographer whom Tillman famously met in a parking lot – swiftly kill it?

Honeybear, then, is a thorough stress test of love: a title fight between love and Tillman’s cynicism. In the fiction of Honeybear, the antagonist’s the narrator. We want Misty, literally, to fall to love.6

In this way, Honeybear parallels Pure Comedy. If Pure Comedy finds Tillman “intimately questioning” God, Honeybear finds him savagely interrogating love.

But same diff, right?

The Album, I Love You, Honeybear:

Sappy, heartfelt, schmaltzy – these terms have followed Honeybear since 2015, but honestly, I wonder if those reviewers only listened to “Chateau Lobby.” Do sappy albums include songs like “Bored in the USA?”

How many people rise and think
"Oh good, the stranger's body's still here, our arrangement hasn't changed
Now, I've got a lifetime to consider all the ways
I grow more disappointing to you as my beauty warps and fades”

If this is schmaltz, it’s schmaltz marinated in bleach. But that struggle – that chiaroscuro between eyes-wide-open adoration and mind-fucked pessimism – IS the album’s magic, which the ILYH liner notes describe fully. And so, while it might smack of a quarter-baked literature term paper to do so,7 I’m going to quote their entirety, as I’ve never seen an artist summarize the concept of their own album so well.

Accompanied by morphine-like violins, violas, cello and a rising storm of drums, Honeybear opens with a love that can literally survive the apocalypse and genetic fate alike (“I’ve brought my mother’s depression/You’ve got your father’s scorn and a wayward aunt’s schizophrenia”), a love built on shared misanthropy and DOOM, a you-and-I-are-the-only-ones-to-ever-get-it kinda vibe.

Is this healthy? The fuck if I know.

But damn if I don’t find this little tableau adorable:

As death fills the streets we're garden-variety oblivious
You grab my hand and say in "I-told-you-so" voice
"It's just how we expected"

It’s a song with enduring images, like getting high and making love as the global market crashes. Or “mascara, blood, ash, and cum on the Rorschach sheets where we make love.”

These lovelies testify not just to FJM’s writing-hutzpah – this big swing at making blood, ash, and cum romantic – but the progress of pop culture. Not even 50 years after the “finger pies” of “Penny Lane” made the BBC gents and dames clutch their pearls, we can joke about birthing the anti-Christ without a single media peep.

But still, all that plants us firmly in “finding someone miserable in the same way you are” territory. Can Misty escape that black hole’s orbit?

“Honeybear” follows with one of the greatest love songs of the 2010s, “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)”: a song so sublime, it not only sounds heavenly in its most nascent form, it renders even something like “Satanic Christmas Eve” as a fangless prop for romance.8 Of all Father John Misty songs, “Chateau Lobby” best shows off his skill for double entendre, except reversed: instead of implying the sexual through the banal, implying the SFW through the NSFW. “Baby, be gentle, it’s my first time” kinda shit – except about falling in love. This culminates with Emma’s invitation to “stay as long as you’d like,” and his beautiful answer, “I haven’t left your bed since.”

But then –

The schmaltz immediately gives way to glitchy isolation (a glitchy isolation present even in the demo!). “True Affection” – whose title CALLS for connection, rather than DESCRIBES it – finds the narrator far away from love, stranded with only emotionless SMS as a lifeline, endlessly repeating his request for intimacy into the void.

Whether this isolation occurs immediately after this encounter with Emma – or if it’s a sampling of what Tillman’s normally like, I cannot say. But the contrast stings, and the following (and outstanding) “The Night J. Tillman Came to Our Apartment” certainly demonstrates what love must overcome.

Over a sweet little tune, FJM gleefully lays his psyche bear, dropping lines like: “Of the few main things I hate about her, one's her petty, vogue ideas.” Or this 2015 all-time gem: “She says, like, literally, music is the air she breathes, and the malaprops make me wanna fucking scream.”

Can love infiltrate such a person?

For a second, there’s hope. Tillman finds his tryst “naked with her best friend in the tub,” an erotic fantasy come fucking true, the trio so intimate they “(sing) silent night in three parts:” a touching little communion beyond the typical bounds of fidelity – until she compares her singing to Sarah Vaughn, and Tillman’s freshly buried cynicism sits up in its shallow grave.

Misty’s bout with romance continues in the album’s middle, with “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” – a Leonard Cohen-ish song that feels both smoldering and sacred (marriage is a setting apart, after all)9 – which affirms a love that sees and is seen and that cherishes, despite the disclosure of his most embarrassing thoughts, like “kissing my brother in my dreams.” A love that conquers both failings and juvenile identities alike.

But of course, even sacred and “set apart,” no union is truly solitary; nettlesome outsiders abound – like in "Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow,” where we find a (probably wasted) Tillman slamming his competitors and bragging about his love’s sexual prowess, making himself look like that tabloidy picture of Bojack Horseman in the process.

She blackens pages like a Russian romantic
Gets down more often than a blowup doll

[But also, I get it. "My genius can't drink in silence, she's got to listen to your tired-ass lines." Has anyone in love NOT wanted to devote their entire intellect to eviscerating the baboons swinging into your paradise?]

John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” comes to mind: a confession that, despite being worshipped by millions of women, his insecurities had not abated. Finding love might lead to “total transformation,” but in its own sense of time, and maybe not at all.

And so, the album turns with “Strange Encounters” and “The Ideal Husband,” songs illustrating Misty’s development – or lack of it, with the first telling of a girl who almost overdosed at his house (and how this shock inspired change) and the latter finding Misty frantic, terrified of his revealed past (like the MC of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband”) and concluding with the decision to have a child, worded awfully like a discussion of suicide.

[Verse 3]
I came by at seven in the morning
Seven in the morning, seven in the morning
I came by at seven in the morning
I said, "Baby, I'm finally succumbing"
Said something dumb like, "I'm tired of running
Tired of running, tired of running"
Let's put a baby in the oven
Wouldn't I make the ideal husband?

But hey, it’s a love song with Julian Assange as a central figure, which I dig, considering I have the mind of an east German with rent-free Stasi sipping tea in my head.

So does his tortured commitment finally bulldoze his mind-prison – or does it augur DOOM for their fledgling love?

To answer that, we must assess the album’s last desperate stretch, starting with the aforementioned lead single, “Bored in the USA,” a cut offering zero solace and could easily fit on Pure Comedy. Based on that alone, we gotta go with DOOM. But he follows with “Holy Shit,” a song written on Tillman’s wedding day and one of the most beautiful tracks on Honeybear (conceptually and aesthetically).

Progressing through a series of antitheses [New regimes, old ideas/That's now myth, that's now real] that read like a poem worthy of Emily Dickenson, Tillman spreads his conceptual net wider and wider, as if he must extend to the beginning of time to express his love at all, simultaneously sponging up and exorcising his cynicism just to prove that his love has nothing to do with that.

Oh, and love is just an institution based on human frailty
What's your paradise gotta do with Adam and Eve?
Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity
What I fail to see is what that's gotta do with you and me

- Holy Shit

Evaporate the bullshit, and love remains. That’s an incredibly beautiful sentiment and a potentially quiet – but exultant – note to end the album on. Except, the ending mirrors this theme in its own anemic, but still beautiful way. While somewhat initially disappointing, there’s realism here. We can’t rhapsodize the flight without honoring the landing.

“I Went to the Store One Day” spins out love’s possibilities based on a chance, fortunate encounter. And like the rest of the album, it dual-wields love and cynicism. Falling for Emma has not flash-erased Tillman’s irksome characteristics. In fact, love looks a lot like lunacy.

We met in a parking lot
I was buying coffee and cigarettes
Firewood and bad wine long since gone
But I'm still drunk and hot
Wide awake and breathing hard
Now, in just one year's time, I've become jealous
Rail-thin, prone to paranoia when I'm stoned
If this isn't true love, someone oughta put me in a home

God, that’s so good. Love is a disturbance, a turning over of everything. It increases security and elation even as it hands over new vulnerabilities and agitations.

And even his marriage proposal is cavalier and beholden to its grad-schooly analysis, acknowledging them as they’re abandoned like a warehouse clearance sale:

Say, do you wanna get married?
And put an end to our endless progressive tendency to scorn
Provincial concepts like your dowry and your Daddy's farm

Whether the vision of “golden years” inspires depends entirely on perspective: have they abandoned their principles and decayed like every marriage decays? Or have they found their fellow eccentrics (like the title track declares) – someone worth hazarding the price of domesticity and parenthood with?

Let's buy a plantation house and let the yard grow wild
Until we don't need the signs that say, "Keep out"
I've got some money left and it's cheaper in the South
I need someone I can trust
To protect me from our seven daughters when my body says "enough"
Don't let me die in a hospital
I'll save the big one for the last time we make love

Does Misty lose to love? Well, here we have him literally dying after their last conjugal rite, if that answers the question. [“the big one” alluding to the French concept of orgasm being “la petit mort,” the little death].

And the ending, too, depends on perspective. Ends are rarely ends, and beginnings are rarely beginnings. The Tillman who wrote “Chateau Lobby” found the music to declare his love, even if he can still write “Bored in the USA.”

But I’m willing to call it. Love won. Love survives even the most potent cynicism. And in an album filled with its own delights, it’s a thrill to write that – like light pouring into the most gnarled and shadowed of woods. Listening makes me want to do insane things in pursuit of love and find the beauty in all of them. Given enough listens, maybe I will.

4

Here’s another sweet angle for those who have yet to read “Make a Fool of Me Daddy.”

Sometimes I wonder why the church worships a guy who spoke in paradoxes and riddles, yet demands the most straightforward pabulum on Sunday. Christianity is a religion of inversions and black truths1, tortured divinity and blood drinking [truly, the most goth/emo of faith systems], yet our sermons come with football metaphors and clean-cut morals, all neatly fitting in a 25 minute slot so the fam can get to lunch.

Then again, this is ecclesial America, so I get it.

Our petri dish doesn’t just squirm with extremists, it foams. I TOO wish to swaddle myself in a Snuggy of bland religion – just to avoid them. I mean, protestants protest, and fundamentalists return to fundamentals: usually by force.2 And those fundamentals, well, they pretty cray. [Leaving family3 and following Christ to your execution4, for starters]. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer began his famous monograph, The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”5 Change the name, and you could put that in a horror novel. Is Christ a dark elf, beckoning travelers off the path forever?

“But, Christ was being hyperbolic!”

“It doesn’t apply to us!”

“Both were being figurative!”

That’s true, perhaps, although the church from the time of Tertullian6 has always celebrated its martyrs.7 Many of them chose to die – like Ignatius of Antioch, who called martyrdom the mark of a true disciple.8 And 1900 years later, our mammal brains still find Bonhoeffer credible because he walked it like he talked it.

Of course, here in the land of big Wal-Marts, we’re more in danger of finding a band-aid in our cheeseburger than facing Nero’s lions, but if we take the gospels seriously, we still must discern the literal and hyperbolic, the honest-to-God commandments vs. the simple provocations. [And have you seen this country’s literacy rates?]. If only the Biblical authors underlined when Jesus was just triggering the holy rollers – or, IDK, strategically employed emojis – we might finally make heads or tails of tone.

I’m being glib (kinda sorta), but only to make a point. Christ spoke extremely. He spoke urgently, and apocalyptically, of a coming age. His morals scandalized.9 He answered simple questions with paradoxes.

These qualities led Christianity, historically speaking, to oscillate between milquetoast family values and radical departures from normalcy; between the mortar that held society together and the solvent that sent it tumbling. Depending on how you emphasize, isolate, assemble, interpret, misinterpret, or completely ignore – you get many different Christianities.

Even more so, as we squint across the widening gulch of millennia.

As a writer, I admire the sayings of Christ. They have mystery, brevity, and power (the qualities of poetry, truly). But I also see their danger, which I discussed in the “(Antichrist Television Blues)” piece.

Danger – not just of religious abuse, but of germinating cults. The teachings of Christ and the behavior of the early church (selling possessions, living communally) both make sense IF YOU EXPECT AN IMMINENT END TO HISTORY. Can we blame cults for following suit?

For what it’s worth, I see the same fondness for paradox and inversion in this week’s song, “At the Bottom of Everything” – features I associate with the best religious writing – just like I see its awareness of the cult potentiality within religion. In fact, I almost named this article, “Whoever Loses His Life Will Find It,” which to me sounds Zen and profound and culty all at once10.

Since Conor Oberst (and his most famous band, Bright Eyes) will certainly be regular guests around these parts, I’ll skip the history THIS TIME, and jump to the music.

The Song, “At the Bottom of Everything”

Bright Eyes fans (and normies alike) quickly learn that every album starts with a skit – take “The Big Picture,” a seven minute song that opens with car-travel-chatter until Conor starts plucking, almost like he busted out the guitar in the backseat and started singing on the spot (like your most insufferable yet awe-inducing friend jumped on the cafeteria table and started rapping11). Or this week’s song, which opens with a little story about a woman in a crashing airplane.

Back in the Dubyastan of 2005, “cringe” was yet to enter the vernacular, but, with its forced-awkward delivery and drinking near the mike and that manufactured audio drop, the word might apply to “At the Bottom of Everything.” ThEn aGaIN, to paraphrase James Murphy, “At the Bottom of Everything,” you’re perfect, oh please don’t change a thing. Your cringe is a portal to the sublime.

And it’s parable-like, this tale of a woman disconnected from the passengers around her and the stories of others (“this really arduous magazine article about a third world country that she couldn’t pronounce the name of”) –

until the plane starts crashing, and her neighbor – who turns out to be quite the eccentric – not only comforts her that they’re going to a birthday party (“it’s your birthday party, happy birthday darling”) but that they “love her very very very much.”

[Birthday party? Born again? I’m just saying].

And then the eccentric neighbor takes out his guitar and sings the rest as they’re dying, which is conceptually bonkers.

Most of our travel buddy’s verses consist of “must” statements, like some-a these:

[Verse 1]
We must talk in every telephone, get eaten off the web
We must rip out all the epilogues from the books that we have read
Into the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair
We must stare, we must stare, we must stare

Here we find the familiar imperative of protest songs – except rendered absurd (and conceptually tasty) by the narrator’s imminent death. Forget visiting prisoners, she’ll be lucky to pull on her oxygen mask.12 The intro then – if you’re inclined to certain readings – questions all moral imperatives. But that’s jumping the gun a little. I wouldn’t call Conor and Jesus a perfect match13, but I see Christ’s commands and absolutism reflected in Conor’s “must” statements. To Contrast and Compare:

[Matthew 5:40] And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

Or –

[Mark 9:43] And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell . . . ]Mark 9:49] For everyone will be salted with fire

IF Christ preached the end of history (and the imminent dawning of a new age), then I’d ask, how different are his “musts” from Conor’s? Of course, I don’t mean to equate the two. Jesus clearly believed in a coming kingdom: an “epilogue” to his current age. But both exhort connection at any cost [“talk in every telephone/eaten off the web”] and to face the bleak truths of life in doing so. To visit the prisoner, whom Christ himself identified with.14 Actions you take when confronted with the end.

Verse 2 mirrors the structure of verse 1, but now the lyrics focus on inversion.

[Verse 2]
We must take all of the medicines too expensive now to sell
Set fire to the preacher who is promising us Hell
Into the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn’t dream
We must sing, we must sing, we must sing

The cures have exceeded affordability, and so they must be taken. Salvation is denied, and so the preacher himself burns. The outcasts are invited to the feast and the first is last. And unlike verse 1, which offered no solution for the doomed inmate, verse 2 suggests the power of music to inspire, to restore consciousness to an unconscious reality. Certainly, Conor’s music has functioned that way for many people. But then again . . .

[to repeat myself here]

No one in the song can do any a’ that.

Is Oberst outing himself as a cowardly nihilist? Or is he simply displaying the realism of John Lennon, who complained that his music changed little but the haircuts?15

I mean, despite having more time left than a 4 minute folk song, we haven’t exactly brought the kingdom; the last are still last. History has not ended. Whether earth can be like heaven or not, people start getting restless.

[Chorus]
While my mother waters plants, my father loads his gun
He says, “Death will give us back to God
Just like the setting sun
Is returned to the lonesome ocean”

What are Christians (or their cult spinoffs) supposed to do as the revolution tarries? Well, the ideas have been legion. Some more respectable than others. Some more recognizable. If those who lose their lives save it, as Christ said, then perhaps we must die. But where does that lead? And where does it stop? When does martyrdom (or the faith itself) become religious suicide?

From the anchorite (who was sealed in a cell until their death – the origin of the word “recluse”) to the flagellants (who shuffled from town to town whipping themselves), Christians have found many ways to suffer and die for Christ.

And since the apocalypse remains figurative16 or future tense, we’ve been left to ask the meaning of history. Something we can never fully know.17

[Verse 4]
We must hang up in the belfry where the bats and moonlight laugh
We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past
Into the caverns of tomorrow with just our flashlights and our love
We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

[Bridge]
(And when we’ll get down there, way down to the very bottom of everything
And then we’ll see it, oh, we’ll see it, we’ll see it, we’ll see it)

Like the parrot in Spielberg’s Lincoln, who prophesies the end of the world so much, his owner finally shoots him, perhaps the only end of history we’ll ever know is our own. We cannot read our way across that epistemic abyss. We must eventually experience it. But there at the bottom, in that lightless place, will we finally see things for what they are? (And presumably, find peace and hope and all that good shit)?

Conor seems to, albeit in his own way.

[Chorus]
Oh, my morning’s coming back, the whole world’s waking up
All the city buses swimming past, I’m happy just because
I found out I am really no one

Whether this is classic non-dualist spirituality or nihilism depends on your worldview. I happen to see it as an ego death, the partition collapsing between self and other, the I and the One. Because it turns out that death and rebirth are the bread and butter of every shamanic tradition18 – maybe Christianity isn’t uniquely emo among the world’s faith systems after all, it just happens to tell us that behind this process is a God of love, and that behind the horror, there’s a plan. There’s no Easter without Good Friday, just like there’s no resurrection without betrayal and demise. Before Christ made the world, he made a pact with death.

The Gnostics and shamans experienced this resurrection directly – and perhaps so did Paul, if we take his vision of the “third heaven” seriously. One way or the other, if Christianity should avoid the slip-n-slide into death-cultdom, this death and resurrection process must be sublimated. I’m interested, therefore, in the spiritual practices abandoned by evangelical Christianity, just like I’m interested in the theology that will help inform the process.

But one does not need mysticism to experience Christ, of course, one must only look into the face of the criminal and love them. For those of us not about to die before a folk song ends, we can shine a light – however dim – as we fall into bedrock reality. Whether or not we can ever build a heaven in hell’s despair by doing so, we certainly can make life better for ourselves and those around us. Is this enough? I don’t know. But in the caverns of tomorrow, it might be all we got.

Honorable Mentions:

• The Thief Next to Jesus – Ka

• Bright Eyes - Five Dice, All Threes

• I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU – JPEGMAFIA

• SMILE! :D - Porter Robinson

• 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips - Xiu Xiu

• No Name - Jack White

• The Lemon Twigs – A Dream Is All We Know

10) Cold Visions – Bladee

I’m not a big action-movie guy, but I know a club-chase song when I hear one. And Cold Visions has like, what, 30 of them? These are stylish paranoid bangers: alternatively deranged and confident. Songs of someone pursuing through a club – or running from it, starving hysterical naked.

I didn’t know Bladee when I lived in Germany, but I could see this being Germany-era music for me. Compared to the horrendous gangster posturing that is most German rap, the EDM inspired beats create an authentic European sound for the Swedish rapper. Even if I just dip into five or six songs at a time, it’s a well I keep dipping from.

9) Bright Future – Adrianne Lenker

Adrianne Lenker’s voice sounds like it came straight from the earth. And these songs are some of the most organic I’ve ever heard. “No one stopped a take,” she told Fader. “We didn’t listen back. I only listened after everybody else left.” The songs sound written on the spot, like the wisdom of the woods is using her body as a vessel. Okay I’m getting off the henny a bit, but between Big Thief and Adrianne’s solo albums, she’s proven herself to be one of this generation’s greatest songwriters, more through accumulation than virality. “Bight Future” is the latest block in her tower, and because of the lo-fi quality, it also happens to be a perfectly revisitable night album.

8) GNX – Kendrick Lamar

So – the feud got old, probably long before the boomers dropped their nachos on Super Bowl Sunday. But to me, GNX stands firm without the feud, despite its obvious inception. Hearing “Got my foot up on the gas but somebody gotta do it” as I drove a U-Haul (at 60mph to save on gas . . .) was a GOATed moment. Few albums tethered users to the present like this one.

But again, it also survived that particular present. After a two-album-wrestle with being a rap messiah, Kendrick finally achieved his “pop” album, cementing his brilliance, IMO, more than another TPAB or Good Kid could.

We get most of Kendrick’s quirks here (“I Deserve it AALLL”) which in the age of AI, only feel relentlessly human and individual. We’re lucky to exist at the same time as Kendrick.

7) Heavy Metal – Cameron Winter

When music discovery becomes rote, there’s always a release like Heavy Metal that thrills me and reminds me why I do this. New loves mean more love. Maybe even new ways of thinking or being.

But I write in the abstract because it seems Heavy Metal has had that kind of effect on a lot of people. Winter writes this almost Werner Herzog-esque poetry that exceeds quotable: its personal and lunatic and soothing and filled with 1000 chicken conga lines and songwriters beaten with ukeleles.

The mix of madman poetry and lullaby – plus a full rock band – is what made Getting Killed, his band Geese’s fourth album, my favorite of 2025.

6) BRAT – Charli XCX

Oh hey, this one looks familiar.

Did I mention ROLLING STONE NAMING THIS THE 34TH BEST ALBUM OF THE 21ST CENTURY?

But this is my list, and it’s only my 6th favorite album of 2024. ^_^

I don’t have an ear for dance music; I couldn’t tell you what makes one beat better than another, but I loved this robust collection (not that anyone needs my recommendation at this point).

5) Only God Was Above Us

Out of my OG favorite bands, Vampire Weekend is among the few to never let me down. In fact – and this is truly crazy – one could plausibly consider “Only God Was Above Us” as Vampire Weekend’s best album.

I don’t know if the term “Aristo-pop” exists, but if it doesn’t, then I claim it. Ezra Koenig just manifests pure taste, style, class, humor, and creative vision. An inspiration for us all.

4) Manning Fireworks – MJ Lenderman

Manning Fireworks didn’t hit me at first. [I was in a Bright Eyes mood, and Bright Eyes he is not]. But goddamn if he didn’t win me over with “deleted scenes of Lightning McQueen, blacked out at full speed” - he got me with that Guitar Hero reference in “Bark at the Moon.” ^_^

Lenderman mixes both high and low culture, humor and profundity, to excellent effect. His songs feel evaporated down to their wisest and funniest moments, and yet still eminently relatable.

Sad he’s no longer touring with Wednesday, but I can see why!

1c) Imaginal Disk – Magdalena Bay

I fucking love this thing. I didn’t have much to say about “Mercurial World” back in 2021, but they double, triple, quadrupled their quality here.

Their Spotify bio says, “Synth Pop straight from the Simulation,” but I disagree. Their music is incredibly human. So perfectly smooth it should sound fake, but doesn’t. It’s candy with depth. The cross between an anime girl and an angel. It’s music that makes me feel like I’m floating upwards in a beautiful orb of music. Needless to say, I’m stoked for whatever they put out next.

1b) Mahashmashana

Oh, another blog album!

Whether my little theory pans out or not, this is probably my favorite FJM album. I might as well quote myself from earlier:

It’s a beautiful, lush, and profound album from front to back. One that’s helped me along my own spiritual journey. For someone uncertain of love and who sees the “dying to yourself” in faith in quite literal, terrible terms, the album is a balm. (And quite great, musically).

1a) Scrapyard – Quadeca

I don’t even remember when and where I encountered “Scrapyard.” At this point, the album just feels like a part of me.

On paper, it’s not hard to imagine why. A rapper who frequently lands Bright Eyes comparisons? There’s no reason I SHOULDN’T like the album. Glitch, folktronica, alt-rap, and the best Kevin Abstract feature in years? Yes please.

Over minimalistic (yet lush and sometimes eerie) beats, Quadeca mixes confidence and vulnerability, his singing and vocal stims maximizing listenability. It’s thrilling to watch him put so much feeling, meaning, and personality in mostly simple lyrics, turning the raw elements of a life into art. The magic could easily fall apart. But it doesn’t. Like the best art, the listener is left to marvel.

To me, this is peak Gen-Z music, and my easy favorite of the year.

At very least, we’re the only music fans in history who could sum up their entire century. [And who could resist such bait?]. Besides the fact that the first LP was released in 1948, very few music fans (outside of like, idk, Smithsonian employees – if they still have those) could name a favorite piece of music from every year in the 20th century.

And, I am a 21st century human. Unless Google makes us immortal, my life will pour into these decades like water in desert sands. So, the project feels apt. These are my favorite albums from each of the last 26 years.

Rules in the footnotes!2

What are yours?

2000 - “Since I Left You” – The Avalanches

2001 - "Is This It?" – The Strokes

2002 - “Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground” – Bright Eyes

2003 - “Elephant” – The White Stripes

2004 - "Funeral" – Arcade Fire

2005 - "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" – Bright Eyes

2006 - “The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me” – Brand New

2007 - "Sound of Silver" – LCD Soundsystem

2008 - “For Emma, Forever Ago” – Bon Iver

2009 - “Merriweather Post Pavilion” – Animal Collective

2010 - "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" – Kanye West

2011 - “Kaputt” – Destroyer

2012 - “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” – Kendrick Lamar

2013 - "Modern Vampires of the City" – Vampire Weekend

2014 - “Run the Jewels II” – Run the Jewels

2015 - “I Love You, Honeybear” – Father John Misty

2016 - “Coloring Book” – Chance the Rapper

2017 - “Saturation I, II, III” – BROCKHAMPTON

2018 - “Some Rap Songs” – Earl Sweatshirt

2019 - “Hiding Places” – billy woods

2020 - “How I’m Feeling Now” – Charli XCX

2021 - “For the First Time”– Black Country, New Road

2022 - "Ants From Up There" – Black Country, New Road

2023 - “10,000 Gecs” – 100 Gecs

2024 - “Scrapyard” – Quadeca

2025 - “Getting Killed” – Geese

I’ve long marveled at the poetic beauty of December 25th. Even though, of course, no one truly knows Christ’s birthday. The original Christians ignored it. Later Christians debated it. And modern Christians repeat a tale about its introduction by Constantine, despite the truth being far more complex. [But isn’t that almost always the case . . .?]

December 25th may or may not be the accountant’s truth, but it embodies the narrative: after the deepest darkness of the year came a great light – and not some piddly department store tree, either.

[What this means for us Geminis/rising Scorpios, born near the summer solstice (aka the brightest part of the year) and ruled by Pluto, who can say? ^_^]

As Linus Van Pelt would recite, the “true meaning of Christmas” involves more than hippos and seeing mommy make out with an immortal elf.

It’s about God, far from the marbled palace, born to a tradesman in an occupied country; God who would overthrow the world’s powers, not through Constantine’s military conquest but through a love that persists even unto death.

Or, at least, that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves.

In the spirit of this week’s muse, Sufjan Stevens, who worked in children’s publishing before releasing the breakout Seven Swans, I will tell my own little children’s story. Albeit, one without proper illustrations, as time and my hatred for AI did not allow [hatred that, since the ancient times of “Record Executive Jesus,” has festered to Mordor-like-extremes]. I think if Google Gemini asks me one more time to remix a photo, my life is going to start looking like a Jacobean revenge play.1

And we can’t have Google kill our fun~

This is – you know – the story of Christmas.

At least, it’s my way of introducing this week’s Heretic Psalm, a gorgeous piece from personal-favorite Sufjan Stevens: an advent song – one that, in its own sweet way, captures the fear and hope of waiting for the light.

The Song, “In the Devil’s Territory”

Before I get to the lyrics, I must acknowledge the title, which (if you read the opening quote) you’ve already gathered came from Ms. Flannery O’Connor: a short-story writer widely regarded as the 20th century’s best. And as it goes, Sufjan has an MFA. So, naturally, he’s read O’Connor. What MFA candidate – since Flannery read her own work in the 40s – hasn’t?2

That being said, Sufjan’s overt homages to the peacock queen3 seem to be a personal flourish (and a boon to critics). Not hard to connect the dots when they’re labeled.

[See also “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or the gorgeous “Everything That Rises,” named after the story collection.]

Being deeply catholic and a product of the 1940s and 50s, O’Connor might pale at the form of my Christmas story [kingdoms of fuckery and all that], but I like to imagine she’d align with the overall thrust. She writes, after all, about grace infiltrating the devil’s works: in essence, the opposite view of many evangelicals.

Rather than God being in charge and wielding evil for his own ends – take the appointment of certain world leaders, for example [because when used by good, evil is good somehow], her stories invert the order. The devil’s in charge – or at least, is quite active – but is undermined and inverted by grace4.

So in her story “The Displaced Person,” a remarkably self-justifying woman takes in Polish WWII refugees – but only as cheap labor on her farm. When they inadvertently generate divisions among the farm-hands, tragedy ensues and leaves her without workers, creating an outer poverty that reveals her inner poverty. OR, in “Circle in the Fire,” local drifters linger around a widower’s farm, eventually burning the woods she claims to “own” – and through this loss, free her from possessiveness.

Despite O’Connor’s overt Catholicism in her personal and intellectual life, this “grace” remained so subtle that her contemporaries often missed it.

Likewise, Sufjan remains one of indie music’s Christian darlings and yet frequently scandalizes Christians. Over sly horns and baroque Americana, his early music expressed profound devotion cut with curious doubt, spun by someone verging on brokenness. When he writes about his friend dying of bone cancer despite the church’s intercessory prayer, for example, his attack did not come from hate, and yet, some fumbled with such meager attacks at all. But then again, his writing – so familiar, like a Midwest summer day, yet so foreign and beguiling, the product of a truly hippy childhood – endeared legions of artsy Christian fans as well.

Considering the gauche mimicry Christians regularly subject themselves to, it’s no wonder. The Christian art world is perpetually open for cornering.5

“In the Devil’s Territory” is undoubtedly an advent song, managing both sweetness and ambiguity. Standard Christian music tends to emphasize the already seen, the revealed, despite the deep reality of doubt and uncertainty in any believer’s life. Christ may have come, but we’re all waiting. What was once seen must now be believed. Outside of 1st century Rome, Christians live as gamblers, betting that – despite the horrors of the world – love will one day reveal itself6. Here we find Sufjan, willing even to die to see it.

[Chorus 2]
We stayed a long, long time
But I’m not afraid to die
To see you, to meet you
To see you at last

If this were Sufjan’s only sentiment, built atop a growing pyramid of gorgeous banjo, theremin7, drums and guitar, “In the Devil’s Territory” might be an all-time church classic. (Might). But the rest is curious.

[Verse 1]
Be still and know your sign
The beast will arrive in time

[Chorus 1]
We stayed a long, long time
We stayed a long, long time
To see you, to beat you
To see you at last

So, it’s also an advent song . . . for the devil.

Waiting around to “beat” the baddie certainly maintains that children’s-book flare.

But simultaneously undercuts it. When you’re waiting a “long long time” for the beast and redeemer alike, it’s a little hard to just close your eyes and mumble along in worship.

Then again, taken in isolation, the classic hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” has congregants extolling Satan, and they mumble along just fine.

1 A mighty fortress is our God,
a bulwark never failing;
our helper he, amid the flood
of mortal ills prevailing.
For still our ancient foe
does seek to work us woe;
his craft and power are great,
and armed with cruel hate,
on earth is not his equal.

Not that we can really compare the songs. Sufjan maintains ambiguity throughout, fostering duality with his extremely sparse verses. For example, here’s the entirety of verse 2:

[Verse 2]
I saw the dragons drying
I saw the witches whine

[A fucking couplet!]

Sufjan’s left us here, desperately tap-dancing with what we got.

So let’s see . . .

Western dragons breathe fire and live in caves. Seems dry. Placed in a Petco, I imagine they’d cozy up to a heat lamp just fine. So has Sufjan stumbled into the dragon’s home? Or does “drying” indicate some sort of mummification/death? Do the witch’s whine because that’s their Pokémon cry (like sighing is a natural writerly sound)? Or, as stand-ins for picture-book evil, do they whine because they suffer?

The last verse compounds the ambiguity further:

[Verse 3]
I stole my father’s shoes
I pulled His pockets too

This could be a personal confession, adding a third figure to the mix, or a play on the idiom “living in someone’s shoes,” in this case, God’s. From a child, shoe-stealing is a charming act: playing grownup. “Pulling pockets” could indicate further theft, or could simply be a child tugging their parent along. And maybe “grace,” from a certain perspective, will always be theft, the way that a vexed customer might explain a bad deal: “I was robbed.”

Which is warm and whatnot, but then the final chorus conflates the devil, Christ, and Sufjan’s father even further, with “beat you” sung right before “meet you,” leaving hopes of clarity in a soup of confusion.8

[Chorus 3]
We stayed a long, long time
We stayed a long, long time
To see you, to beat you
To see you, to meet you
To see you at last9

The beating of Christ comes to mind – and Jessie Lacey’s nailing up Christ a second time [the “beating,” not of the first crucifixion, but of a coming figure]. But I’m willing to entertain the conflation of all three: devil/Christ/father. Not that they’re the same entity (per say), but that, given our lack of final knowledge, our fear will conflate them.

As I wrote in “Muh’fucka, You Promised,” I believe that a “final judgement” is just as much a judgement of God as it is of us. David Bentley Hart suggests this as well, vocalizing a long held inclination of mine by doing so.

In the depth of winter’s darkness, when warmth has paled and light has dwindled, we celebrate a coming dawn. Christians hold to the existence of that new day and, like Sufjan, have waited a long, long time to see it. But when the curtain lifts, the veil tears, the stage-walls come crashing down, what sort of God will we find there?

A cruel archon, sneering at humanity?

A father, pissed at how we’ve been running the place?

Love itself?

With this uncertainty, apprehension arises quite naturally. Should we prepare ourselves for a fight? Or to surrender?

If you’ve “pulled your father’s pockets,” will there be hell to pay?

This life, at first blush, does not suggest a universe run by love. And yet, love exists, and people can experience it in near infinite ways. The very existence of love, in an O’Connorish fashion, undoes the work of evil. If love exists at all, then mercy is possible. Change is possible. Healing, too. It might always be on the backfoot, but imagine a world without it.

Like Flannery, Sufjan’s music allows darkness as much canvas space as it takes, so that the light might truly astonish. Christians hold fast to the promise of that love, and at Christmas refamiliarize themselves with it. Even the “worldly” elements that our friend Linus Van Pelt would deride – the flashy-flashy lights and presents under the tree that so easily obfuscate a story of divine love – can become radiant, a chance to bring light in the dark, to practice a charity otherwise constrained throughout the year: one so powerful, it broke WWI’s enemy lines.

I struggle to hold to that love too, but I can’t ignore it. And yet this year, more than most, I’ve meditated on it. And so, I wish you a merry Christmas my friends, regardless of when you read this, and my foes, a joyous new year.

[P.S. Sufjan has a Christmas album. Five discs in fact. And if that’s not enough, there’s a second set of five. Give them a listen!]

Father John Misty . . . AKA, that guy who made a music video where “Kurt Cobained” gets crucified on a cardboard cross next to Jon Arbuckle? The guy who told God to “try something less ambitious the next time you get bored??” To quote a seminarian I know about the sardonic guru: “Father John Misty? I would rather listen to LMFAO.”

I mean, I know Pitchfork exists in name only now; I didn’t realize they were so culturally indigent, they had to troll for clicks!

Or at least . . .

That’s what I thought BEFORE listening to the album. Now – I’m not sure. Conjecturing someone’s religious views is probably hacky and gauche (as if that would stop me), but I must concede, the idea has merit. Enough that I’d write a 4600~ word article about it.

Not that we’ll get a FJM “Jesus is King” anytime soon, nor a GrimesAI moment,

but certainly, Christianity has always influenced him, even in opposition, and I can see further integration of the Christian imagination into his song writing.

For fun though (and you better fear that fun . . .), I will argue that Pitchfork is right, and that – based on Mahashmashana – we can speculate about FJM’s upcoming “Christian” era, however unorthodox that might look.

Regardless of this specific transformation, the album represents a clear end to the Father John Misty project. The Sub Pop Mashashmashana listing says, “After a decade being born, Josh Tillman is finally busy dying.” Albeit, one with a bit of an escape hatch; Tillman himself has said this will be the last Father John Misty record, even if he makes another one. But with plentiful throwbacks to the first album bookending the discography, the project details an ego death, a fated1 defeat to foolishness, and a cosmic rebirth. A perfect “final” album.

THE TLDR:

This post is long. So long, rumor has it that monks are in their cells, scrolling through it to this day. Jump around – or out :’( – as you see fit.

My Central Hypothesis:

As FJM states, time makes fools of us all. And based on the songs, Christianity is the specific foolishness Tillman has entertained. After his career, becoming a Christian would constitute a cosmic joke – doubly so, if both Christians and atheists misunderstand his particular spirituality. But by discussing his “defeat,” Tilman acknowledges his unlikeliness as a Christian vessel and a realization that Christ chose the outcasts and “losers” all along.

To assess this claim, I will analyze each of the album’s songs.

Index:

• “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”

• “Mahashmashana”

• “She Cleans Up”

• “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose”

• “Mental Health”

• “Screamland”

• “Being You”

• “Summer’s Gone”

“I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”

Our tale begins with a quote-on-quote “Greatish Hits” record, featuring a previously unreleased song, “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All.”

An antiquated concept, the greatest hits album, that surely in this day-and-age must be a statement piece. For like, at least four reasons:

1. what indie artists release “greatest hits” albums?

2. Streaming has made the greatest hits album completely irrelevant with playlists

3. Has Misty had a hit? (Sorry Josh2)

4. Streaming has rendered the idea of “hits” largely meaningless, also. Top 40 is merely an expression of a sub-genre, now, a sub-genre of those who listen to radio or actually buy songs.

So, we could regard the project as a shameless commercial grab (albeit, a self-aware one3). And certainly, if Tillman were to drive the metaphorical ice-cream-truck and lure out that filthy lucre, self-deprecation’s how he’d do it. But considering the “loser” motif of the collection, we have to entertain deeper meanings than a cursory statement about legacy, ego, and success.

I MEAN –

HE’S DYING ON THE COVER. AND MAHASHMASHANA IS A CREMATION GROUND. I think he’s trying to tell us something, and it’s not a stretch to say so.4

A greatest hits album typically signifies an end point. The cow might not be out to pasture YET, but they ain’t winning any county fairs either. “All hits in the past!” Such an album declares. Is Misty there yet? Considering his critical success, I don’t think so. At least one or two of his albums rank among the best of the 2010s, and he’s had no true flops. Assuming an actual end, this is a choice, not a drop-off.

Which gets us to the song itself.

Misty once described his song writing process as excising stanzas from an ongoing epic poem, and that really shows here. If Joey Ramone were a folk singer, he’d be like ‘seventh verse, totally different from the first.’ Any listener, therefore, should hesitate to declare a singular meaning, as the song’s figures range from archetypal (a drunk king pontificating to his step-sons) to universal (people waiting for death) to specific-seeming (the “greatish minds” defending a “goliath” probably = silicon valley Trump supporters) to the personal.

Therefore, whatever Christian messaging we can derive only begins the theory; it does not standalone.

Much depends on the bridge:

My drink is watered down
My champion’s on his knees
He lost the rematch, he lost the comeback
He lost for charity
But that’s the job
It’s what gets the asses in the hall
They came for a beating
And he came to crawl5

Who is Tillman’s champion? This figure seems paramount. And unless he refers to an inscrutable personal hero, I only see two genuine hypotheses:

1. Bernie Sanders – who lost the rematch (of sorts) to Joe Biden, which, in a certain light could be considered “charity” that gets “the asses in the hall” of power.

   [Except, this song existed in 2019 before the 2020 primary, and so did the bridge].

2. Jesus – who famously “loses” his throwdown with death and the devil for “charity,” and by doing so, gets the asses “in the hall": aka, not in the seats. By revealing the injustice of the sacrifice, Christ gets people to leave the scapegoating-sacrifice-game they had been playing. [This is, of course, a Girardian formulation, with further notes for nerds in the footnotes6].

OR you know, I’m just Christ-pilled and seeing ol’ Yeshua under every pebble. It’s possible. However, I point to verse 6, which plainly traffics in Christian imagery:

I killed a rattlesnake this morning
It was coiled up behind the truck
Put it in reverse and hit him clean
But something he said went in and stuck
“Hey, I can sell you a million records
I mean your image could use an overhaul
Don’t you know time just makes fools of us all”

Crushing a serpent is classic Christ shit, but then again, imagery does not equal conversion. The devil has long been equated with Hollywood decadence and here might simply stand for greater fame (beyond means that we know of, like turning down the Rolling Stone cover). Rejecting the offer places him in “Vegas, doing his greatest hits,” as he quips. But that begs the question: why?

Well, if we follow the hypothesis: because he’s making Christian music.

“Sin City” might be an odd arena to croon about the blood of Christ, but maybe not. A few times in the album, Tillman evokes Christians as outcasts, losers, and hopeful gamblers. So, singing out the “losers exodus” has its own logic here.

In this hypothetical, FJM has entered Jesus Walks, “if this takes away from my spins” territory, except – actually career-ruining (supposedly). He’s gone to pasture, or maybe, found his place chilling with the lepers and degenerates.7

“Mahashmashana”

Before we get any farther pontificating about “Mahashmashana,” we should discuss just what the hell a “Mahashmashana” is.

The Doctrine of the Bhagavad Gita says:

It is the real Kurukshetra for the Jivatma where it hears in full the song of life--Mahashmashana, the great burning ground, where it hears the voice of the cosmic deep and where Ahamkara is reduced to ashes. It is Mahashmashana because it is the death of the individual man from whose ashes the regenerated man springs into existence electrified by the Song of Life. If he has emerged from this final struggle triumphant, then he is a full-blown adept, a Jivanmmukta, who has entirely merged himself in the One Life. He is now called a Paramahamsa, that is, one who has realized “That:” that is He, the One Life, and himself are one (p. 24).8

Wow –

Tabling my sad fumbling with the jargon, here, not only is the old FJM burnt to ash, we should see him springing up, “electrified by the Song of Life.”

That’s a really audacious claim – and extremely curious, to say the least.

And, having been burned up, he no longer has “to do the corpse dance” in his gaudy entertainment suit, a reference to “Fun Times in Babylon” (“before they put me to work in a government camp, before they do my face up like a corpse and say, “Get Up and Dance”), which itself was probably referencing “Thriller.”

A zombie, notably, represents resurrection without salvation (let alone consciousness), so burning a corpse prevents that resurrection/reincarnation into brain-eating decay (if I learned anything from playing Resident Evil . . .).

FJM is leaving Hollywood – and it seems, his role as FJM.

Like many in the music industry who MAKE IT OUT, he wouldn’t be the first to present his departure in enlightenment terms, like he’s reached the fucking top of Dharamshala. But I think the album presents other interpretations as well. What sort of general enlightenment has Misty found, and can it be Christian in nature? At first glance, verse three suggests otherwise:

Like there’s no baby in the king cake
Like there’s no figure on the cross
They have gone the way of all flesh
And what was found is lost

Christ has left us. And everything’s lost. Fucking hell.

Except, these lines clearly toy with Amazing Grace (“I once was lost, but now am found”) and suggest something truly profound. Categorically speaking, for anything to be “found,” it must first be “lost.” This sounds like a masturbatory philosophical truism, but if things are exactly as they’re supposed to be, then we couldn’t accurately call them “lost.” And Christianity is about finding the lost. The problem for Christians arises not from their diagnoses but from their proclamation that with Christ, the battle has been won; death is defeated, and love unites all things.

If this will ever become true, it certainly isn’t now. No one is truly “found” in this life. Not in any final sense. We are always in process, all the way up to death, and probably after it.

And, of course, Christ is gone.

Christ is the king who does not rule his kingdom, because we all must do that.

The orthodox would say, because “God sent the Holy Spirit, so that we will become like Christ.” In his absence – as again, if Christ came to establish the kingdom of God, his first act was to immediately leave – the dark truth is that we all must become Christ in our karmic cycle towards unification with the One. Same thing, I think.

Like in “Time Makes Fools,” Misty speculates about the absurdity of this position for himself.

Is a scheme to enrich assholes
What the godhead had in mind
When he hid here such revelations
As only singers could describe?

These lines might be directed towards any number of grifters within the faith, as I discussed in the “(Antichrist Television Blues)” post.

But they could also refer to Tillman himself. What sort of plan involves this guy being God’s mouthpiece? And if any true spiritual insight comes from Josh Tillman (preempting this piece, actually!), why make these truths so arcane, discernible only to those with big beautiful brains and big beautiful bags of drugs?

Depending on how we read the song, his fame won’t do it. The divine feminine – the figure he describes waiting for his “mahashmashana” – is patient. She might, as he says, “one day produce a happy man.” Is this pure FJM cynicism? Or hope in the process of reincarnation?

Whether Christian (heterodox) or otherwise, the spirituality here clearly transcends a career change. And while the song opens the album, it sounds like (and functions as) a closer. The rest follows Misty’s journey to this point.

“She Cleans Up”

I swear this one will be in the movies someday. Just listen to it and picture the action trailer. But putting that aside -

The song operates on two levels. First, as a Kill Bill-esque, Me Too vendetta thriller. [I won’t really talk about this, as it doesn’t factor into the Pitchfork/Plym hypothesis]. Second, as a quasi-gnostic tale of Mary Magdalene saying “fuck that” to God’s self-sacrifice plan. As perhaps it’s unnecessary to say, a salvation plan involving the death of God (aka. the ground of being itself) – or scratch that, even a salvation plan involving the death of a beloved – will seem not just unacceptable, but untenable madness to their lover.

Where Mahashmashana presents an end to the karmic cycle of rebirth, here we’re yelling “hallelujah” as we “give the karmic wheel a spin” (i.e. as we off the perps and creeps - pretty badass, actually). “The aggrieved becomes aggressor and we do it all again.” In other words, shit keeps spinning.

There’s a reason Norse mythology was a cycle – revenge just circles.

Here, Misty speaks as “a demon” who understands the inner workings of the industry (and the world). This reflects his entrance into Hollywood (back in 2012’s Fear Fun) and could also kick ass in a movie scene.

[Bridge]
Take it from a demon who can say I never said
Take it from a demon that the devil don’t protect his friends
Take it from a demon, he’ll never work in this town again
Take it from a demon, he’ll make sure an angel goes down next

The outro continues the cycling motif with a barrage of phrases that suggest endless births and aggressions – ending with the somewhat ambiguous phrase, “It’s a good thing God gave us someone on whom we can depend to clean up.”

In typical Father John Misty fashion, I could read this sarcastically, i.e. that men create the problem and then “thank God” that women can fix it. This is a valid reading, but because of the overall context of the album, I’m willing to hypothesis broader – that God sent someone to end this cycle. But that will only make sense when we get to later songs.

“Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose”

Finally, a self-mythologizing sequel to the loveably cynical and overbearingly caustic “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment” [a title that makes Tillman sound like this folklore, Dr. Seuss creature kicking open a door while dual-wielding bottles of Hennessy], which demonstrated FJM’s character before meeting his beloved Emma and featured lines like, “She says, like, literally, music is the air she breathes/And the malaprops make me wanna fucking scream.” Here in “Accidental dose,” we find Tillman given an ego death by the exact kind of corny person he condemns.

She put on Astral Weeks
Said, “I love Jazz, “ and winked at me

This is the last place I oughta be
But I can’t drive, and I sure can’t sleep

While not directly relating to the Christian hypothesis, the lyrics indicate a dead-end: an abandonment of his former cynical persona, particularly while marooned in a grad-schooly, disparagement-heavy conversation he probably frequently indulged in.

[Verse 2]
A publicist and a celibate
Started talking politics
By a small degree, she got him to admit
They’re tacit fascists without knowing it

And oh, this went on and on
Performance art, an elaborate con
Baby, who wears pеarls at four AM?
This Pynchon yuppie found meanings end

From this place of “no shape,” he realizes he’ll “never be whole again,” and like any proper psychedelic break, is carried by a Beatlesy outro back to the streets, where he must do (and become) something else, if simply because this former reality will “never taste as sweet again.”

“Mental Health”

This middle-song flips the positive perception of “mental health” and instead renders it a tool of government and market control. A force of conformity, labeling, and productivity. One might think of soldiers learning to meditate or corporate-sponsored therapy sessions.

I don’t have any overt opinions on Tillman’s stance here, but I would point out that “psyche” originates from the Greek and translates to spirit or soul. How much does modern psychology/psychiatry concern itself with soul? Do diagnoses just tell us what’s wrong with us? Or do they help us actualize? I honestly don’t know. The issue of anti-depressants is another story altogether.

But the song draws heavily from Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon, a circular prison where uncertainty of surveillance allowed prisoners to be controlled with the fewest number of guards.

Misty describes a “cathedral in the prison” – something I considered his own flourish until researching this article and discovering that the original panopticon featured a chapel at its center. [Catnip for the mind of someone like Tillman!].

Against these self-enforced pressures and self-limiting spiritual norms, he advocates (for himself and his child) to “find the edge and baby, go, go, go” and calls this the “endeavor of your soul.”

Now, this could be a post-mortem for the Pitchfork/Plym theory – run away from that state-controlled spirituality! – except that Misty describes a similar edge-seeking in the following “Screamland,” a very Christian song in overall messaging.

Absolutely, the theory would fall apart without “Screamland.” But then again, I wouldn’t be theorizing without it either. Just as Christians claim that Christ’s divinity changed the meaning of history, the following song changes the meaning of the album. Whether completely or partially, we cannot yet say.

“Screamland”

This is the song Pitchfork compared to “modern Christian rock,” which FJM himself has cagily referred to as a worship song. I gave Pitchfork shit earlier, but I probably couldn’t phrase the sound of Screamland better: “a song whose towering wall of sound combines the terrible sweet pressure of Low with the pop hedonism of “Party in the U.S.A.”

As for the Christian thing, the lyrics speak for themselves:

[Bridge]
Love must find a way, love must find a way
After every desperate measure, just a miracle will take
Love must find a way, ah, love must find a way
After every desperate measure, just a miracle will take

[Verse 3]
Roll the stone away, I wanna go
Where everyone’s perfect beneath their robes
Honey, take me down to the water’s edge
Mama said that we could get my hip brace wet

Maybe we are living in a state of grace returned
Maybe faith like this has at least one practitioner
Rings up to the knuckles, sutures in the bath
Here lie the born losers, God won’t take them back

This is the least cynical I’ve ever seen Father John Misty – but even his “least” amount of cynicism still projects love as a “desperate measure” and devotion as an epitaph. The chorus lends a touch of ambiguity, but it’s hardly a stretch to call these verses “Christian,” even if its faith is odd, tortured, and singular. “Rings up to the knuckles” suggest max-devotion (giga-married); bathed-sutures suggest healing, the opposite of self-harm. “Here lie the born losers, God won’t take them back” is a profoundly Christian sentiment, casting himself as the broken goods that God can’t return. And in a similar way, he earlier hijacks Outkast’s “I’ll Call B4 I Cum” for radically different purposes:

This year’s wine tasted suspicious but just enough like love
God must be with the outcasts ‘cause when I call, you come

This shows a striking understanding of Christianity, which probably is no surprise from someone who once graced the cover of Relevant magazine (even while turning down Rolling Stone!).

The rest of the song describes an unusual, but potent, belief, beginning with an optimist shooting the lamplight out of a brakeman’s hand. AKA, “finding the edge and going,” as described in "Mental Health.” This will look like madness, and maybe is, as any death and rebirth will be.

And you could say that no one here really believes
In the future, in perfection, that things aren’t what they seem
Like a sucker with a scratcher, like a fuck-up with a dream

Stabbing at the ashtray like it might give up the truth
Like it might finally confess who else you’re nearly faithful to

Here the guy who once wrote “When the God of Love Returns, There Will Be Hell to Pay” casts himself with those who believe, even when it seems impossible that anyone does. Or for that matter, that God could love someone so feckless in their devotion. Turning Bob Dylan’s Christian-era “When He Returns” around [“How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal?”], Misty question’s God:

Since I lied to keep you, I’m starting to feel
Like how long can you love someone for the weakness they conceal?

Unlike actual Christian music, “Screamland” maintains an edge, contrasting the pure hope of the verses with the reality of a world so brutal, it requires anesthetics to get by [“stay young/get numb/in Screamland”].

But where does that leave us?

Well, the rest of the songs vary in explanatory mileage, but from “Screamland” alone, Tillman proves he COULD, if HE WANTED TO, write an excellent Christian album. Whether he will, who can say?

“Being You:”

About this song, Tillman said, “I don’t mind telling you that I had a bit of a five year fugue state after 2016 where I found it basically impossible to relate to human beings, or my mind self. I went into what Gen-Z-ers are calling a “dissociative state,” and I thought that would make a great hit song.”

Clearly, the God’s Favorite Customer era lands in that “fugue state,” his “taking acid for anxiety” epoch, with the extreme depersonalization of the “Mr. Tillman” video and the gimmick of “Tillman” so easily spelling “Ill Man.”

But that’s not how I experience THIS song at all. Yes, he begins cheekily:

I’m nodding yes
I’m making my face go
Like I am listening, that’s nice

And this sounds like pure simulation of human decency, but then Tillman spends much of the song speculating about – rather than avoiding – his interlocutor.

[Chorus]

And I wonder what it’s like
I wonder what it’s like to be you
Can you tell me how it feels?
Can you tell me how it feels?
Being you

This might represent someone with no conception of humanity at all, but the desire to learn represents maturity: the opposite of the infantile demi-god lacking notion of anyone outside themselves. Consider the rap-villain stance of El-P in “Twin Hype Back:” ‘We don’t have a need to know your feelings/we don’t believe the same shit anyway.’ A sentiment excusing revenge, like in “She Cleans Up.”

Lastly, “Being You” offers speculation about a stunt double.

[Verse Two]

After the jump
I’m not even sure who’s left
Maybe the stunt guy was my true sеlf
Under the skin
We’rе not much on the eyes
A real mess, where soul must reside

This clearly references the Mr. Tillman video, where Josh watches himself fall from the balcony, get up, and drive away.

But if we’re going to be Christ-pilled about it [*ESOTERIC INTERPRETATION ALERT*], the jump could refer to “Mental Health” and its running off the edge, and the stunt double bit could refer to the swap described in early Christianity: the “not I who live but Christ” dealio. BUT, I wouldn’t stake the theory around it.

“Summer’s Gone”

The real end to the album? I mean, it does indeed literally end the album, but thematically, that’s debatable.

Even while pimping the Pitchfork/Plym argument, esoteric or otherwise, I can’t honestly claim a specifically Christian interpretation here. That being said, the song bookends his first album, “Fear Fun,” after FJM strode in on his Armageddon horse thirteen years ago, which now that I think about, I guess he’s fond of doing.

I drive around the city
The place I knew is gone
There’s no fun left to fear, but to Georgie
It’s still Babylon

Even without leaving Hollywood literally, Hollywood as its former experience has vanished. Rather than any particular drug or religion granting that ego death, simple fatherhood here seems to have done it, unless you believe AI.

But you know, he’s talked about her on podcasts and how he’s given her a lavish education in boomer rock. So AI can hoover a bag of dicks.

In fact, the lessons of fatherhood seem to have even granted an immortality of sorts (nature’s immortality, at least).

But you eat a peach or you skin your knee
And time can’t touch me

Does this invalidate my theory about becoming a Christian fool? Perhaps. Or perhaps they’re not mutually exclusive. Nothing definite can be said, other than the Father John Misty era might be drawing to a close, and even that is more of a slow push than a slam. But it’s fine. Time – or FJM himself – will probably make a fool of me too.

In the end, it’s a beautiful, lush, and profound album from front to back. One that’s helped me along my own spiritual journey. For someone uncertain of love and who sees the “dying to yourself” in faith in quite literal, terrible terms, the album is a balm. (And quite great, musically).

I remain very interested in whatever Tillman does next.

4

But at the same time, since the time of Dylan, horn-rimmed fans have annoyed artists by “decoding” the meaning of their work, finding the truth of life in a motorcycle shirt and whatnot. Interpreting song lyrics is probably an inherently foolish enterprise. But to paraphrase Billy and Mandy here, “Well, if you didn’t make your babies so delicious, Dracula wouldn’t have to interpret them!”

As a child, I wept for my great-grandfather.

This fragment is so isolated, it could be a dream, except it has the distinctive heft of memory: the navy of the conversion van’s interior, stepping from the A.C. into the asphalt swelter, the realization that, against the sheer transience of this moment (when would I ever return to this rest stop?), a German-American mechanic and firefighter (who organized the local company’s easter egg hunt) was burning for eternity.

There’s a child’s pathos, of course, categorizing him this way. But then again, it’s an adult’s callousness that would ignore the little facets that made him human.

My parents were annoyed – as comforters confronted with the inconsolable are annoyed – but ultimately rendered mute by the logic of their faith. Evangelical Christianity, to its credit, lays out one small condition for salvation. Believe on the Lord Jesus. Great Grandpop did not meet that. Therefore, he was damned. Either their religion was false – or their hopes.

I sympathize. What can parents say here? Perhaps all Christians nurture doubts or secret yearnings for mercies hidden in the shadowy borders of their Lord, but how do you express those to a child?

But if you permit another example –

Growing up, I fretted for the salvation of “unsaved” relatives. Able only to pester them about Jesus (if I had the courage to do that, which I mostly didn’t), I was forced to accept the justice of the situation: they deserved the hell they could never truly know existed, because they rejected a God who refused to show his face.

A coldness naturally ensues.

One must go to college. Get a job. Somehow live without imploding under existential angst.1 And besides – one cannot stop what God will not stop.

Our Lord, after all, was Arminian2 and valued freedom so highly, he would not interfere as his children plunged themselves into the flames. So at least in my frustration and despair, I became a low-res image of my helpless God.3

But I start this way (and not with my usual fare), because I imagine others share the experience of this week’s song, “Could Never be Heaven.” I share because Hell affects all of us. Hell is always personal. It cannot be spoken of with abstraction.

My “usual” fare, shamelessly promoted here:

Younger me would not understand this, but there’s wisdom in the bar-atheist who says, “if all my friends are in hell, I don’t want to go to heaven.” In part, because the spirit of Christ descends into hell to save the captive4; in part because we’re not ourselves without each other; in part because we should not accept a system where those we love are lost forever because they did not accept a proposition.

But before we progress further, I must say: this article borrows liberally from David Bentley Hart’s third meditation in That All Shall Be Saved, “What Is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image.”

I cannot overstate my debt owed to DBH in this article (and this site). For me, That All Shall Be Saved was an electric fence. Grabbing it brought me to my knees and – in coordination with other key influences – led me here.

I cannot recommend it enough.

The Song, “Could Never Be Heaven”

The piece opens like something from Skyrim, all medieval and minstrelly, quickly leading to a mystic question: “Do you know the words/that make the secret door open?/ Can you speak my secret name and fix me?”

It’s an odd sound for an emo band, but fitting for Science Fiction, their smoldering final album. Here, the raging of 2006’s The Devil and God had quieted, and in its place, a scorched determination.

Before the hiatus – and before Jesse’s sexual scandals made that hiatus indefinite – “LP5,”5 Brand New’s alleged final album, had become almost legendary, with fan fervor ballooning to enormous proportions. Hype easily bursts, but in this case, mostly endured. The smoldering sound captured their youthful anger without making a sad, fatherly imitation of themselves.

His lyrics, too, had matured since The Devil and God. [if not artistically, emotionally].

But first a quick note –

Fans have staged an eight year war over forgiving Lacey: whether his contrition is real, etc. I cannot add to that conversation, but I can acknowledge it. Beyond music, this is a blog about love and hell, Christ and Satan: a blog that already discussed Lacey as a self-avowed reprobate. But for what it’s worth, fatherhood has SEEMED to soften his ego and expand his selflessness [hence, the maturation].

“Could Never Be Heaven” might as well be That All Shall Be Saved: Meditation Three, the Song: Hart’s argument that “it would be possible to be saved as individuals if it were possible to live as individuals” (p. 145).

[This is a drawn out topic, so notes for nerds in the footnotes!]6

Ultimately, “Could Never Be Heaven” poses the same question as their song Jesus Christ: can I be saved?

I have no heart, I have no brain
Lord, I have no courage
Can you get me home again?

But then raises that question to the communal –

[Refrain]
Could never be heaven without you
Could never be heaven without you
Never be heaven without you

Someone lacking a heart, brain, and courage, BY THE WAY, is not just trifecta-fucked, they obviously need somebody to like, lead em to the wizard, cause they aint’ doing shit.

It’s the same gauntlet. Except here, he’s far more resigned. Lacey leaves the salvation question open in Jesus Christ. Here, the answer is no. If those we love aren’t saved, we’re not saved either. There’s no anger here. Just a quiet, resigned sinking. What sort of heaven requires AirPods to drown the screams?7 What paradise can make us forget our great-grandfather?

To this conundrum – how is it heaven without those we love? – David Bentley Hart dissects two mainline Christian responses.

1. “The Divine Lobotomy” - to spare the saved, God erases their memory of the damned. [This was the theory I heard growing up, an extension of God “wiping every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4)]. Memories of family reunions become one big annihilated smudge.8

2. “The Glory of Contrast” – as Aquinas instructs us, the blessedness of the saved (when contemplating the grace that saved them from such a fate) would increase from the suffering of the damned, the way darks bring out lights in composition.

The first eliminates our humanity (as Hart suggests), the second is so hellish, it makes nonsensical the definition of heaven.

This is exactly why, in verse three, Lacey states:

You are not alone
We are not separate
My daughter's shoulders are my shoulders
My son's hands my hands
My wife's heart my own heart

We get our bodies from our parents, our quirks from our ancestors and culture. The heart of our spouse is our heart.9 No moral decision happens in isolation. Even the hermit needed someone to raise them. And yet, we are supposedly judged alone.

We’re so corroded with fear, so isolated, and yet family can (if it does not go awry) call forth selflessness in us. It makes sense that Lacey as a parent would have this insight. Few of us develop universal, Buddha-like love, but parenting is saintliness in miniature: the biological urging to live for someone other than your fucking self.

Because we don’t live alone. For Hart, humanity – and the body of Christ – is only complete in its totality. “The loss of even one would leave the body of the Logos incomplete, and God’s purpose in creation unaccomplished” (p. 144). Because the body of Christ involves everyone, Christ leaves the flock to find the lost.

Lacey does not consider the option of universal salvation, hence Verse Two explores the theme of connectivity from a point of damnation:

I was drowning in the lake, damned
Over a dead mining town
The cars and the homes lay still in the water
The deeper I sank, the less I died
The trees swayed, slow in the tide
There were people I love below me singing

[Refrain]
And all of the songs were about you
And all of the songs were about you
And all of the songs were about you

And yet, this mining town is clearly not hell, nor does it espouse Hell’s attitude, which is isolation in its rawest form.

The refrain flips “no more songs about you” from Jude Law and the Semester Abroad – possibly inverting his breakup sentiment also:

[Verse 2]
And even if her plane crashes tonight
She’ll find some way to disappoint me
By not burning in the wreckage
Or drowning, at the bottom of the sea

- Jude Law and the Semester Abroad

[see what I mean about increased emotional maturity :P]

If all of the songs were about Jesse, then all his petty shit, all his breakup lyrics scrawled over teen’s Myspace pages, all his making fun of Adam Lazzara – all that was about him. Which could, in theory, be solipsistic. But it can also be redemptive, the basic instinct of the golden rule and most moral systems: that we’re all connected; that everyone’s hurt is OUR hurt.

Thankfully, even though Lacey does not account for it, the options are not just:

1. Callous acceptance of the damned

2. Damning ourselves with them

A universal reconciliation allows for hell – but one peopled with a searching Christ (and, in the same spirit, searching bodhisattvas) who will find them all.

This is not just mythological. We understand the cosmic Christ by studying the earthly Christ, who preached to the poor and sick and outcast. A friend of lepers and prostitutes. Christ was like the Tao, which flows to the low places that people disdain. And in fact is so associated with the suffering that one finds Christ in them.

To quote Jay Electronica, “you can find Christ where the lepers and the lames at.” And so, every time I walk past a beggar; every time I do not reach down to a soul in hell, I am declining the spirit of Christ.

That kills me.

But to ape Hart again, I will end this article with George MacDonald:

Hell prompts us to be like Christ; this is the only way, as Hart so beautifully claims, that hell could increase the glory of God.

Compared to the mainline view of eternal torment, it at least makes moral sense of the gospel (the “good news”) to me. This is a powerful mythological framework for altruism – one that does not rely on fear.

We are in hell when we live for ourselves. We can experience this daily, and much of our art attests to it. But if hell is other people, as Sartre put it, so is heaven. We can taste of heaven, even in the smallest morsels then, when we do not give up on each other. Right here. Right now.

The Shin’s “Mine’s Not a High Horse” – a song about band squabbles from a man who thanks God he has no religion1 – is perhaps not the fertilest ground for spiritual truth. But you know, some seeds thrive in rocky soil. And some Heretic Psalms really reap that sweet sweet esoteric2 meaning.

Recorded after the breakout success of Oh, Inverted World, the Chutes Too Narrow sessions found James Mercer pressured: from a late success (by pop standards), from fear of the sophomore slump, and – relevant to this essay – from turbulent band dynamics. This weather system could have created a Trainwreckords-worthy perfect storm, but instead gave us the nearly-perfect late-spring day of Chutes Too Narrow3.

But in “Mine’s Not a High Horse,” we find Mercer’s conflicts still unresolved. As he recounts in his Life of the Record interview, The Shins began as a Mercer-directed-and-produced side project for Flake, a band with a band-driven creative approach. But as regime shifts typically go, not every ex-Flaker transitioned smoothly, with some viewing his creative rein-taking as quote-on-quote “dictatorial.”

While every unhappy band is unhappy in their own way, the genetics of the band squabble are primordial.

Probably the first cro-magnon to whistle over a beat was called a huge dickhead by the guy banging on the stump, and they went their separate ways. Band squabbles may as well be rock’s Cain and Abel story: the bloody fratricide that immediately follows Eden.

Okay, so IMMEDIATE is a bit of poetic flourish . . .

The battering of egos takes many forms, but almost axiomatically, if musicians are going to separate, they don’t just fall apart, they collapse4. Even outside of creative struggles, the label pressures and fan expectations crush; the presence of grifters and parasites depletes; the withdrawal of love and praise – after a flop or longer creative decline – suffocates. Even silent breakups are still often freighted with uncertainty, insecurity, and angst. Mercer seems to realize this, which is perhaps why the song makes no attempt at reconciliation.

You see nobody is wise enough
To turn the ancient boat around

And in the case of The Shins specifically, the battering revolved around sanctimony – making it particularly juicy for this blog.

"I never knew he thought that"
I heard you say, falling out of the van
"Don't ask for his opinion
They ought to drown him in holy water"
Will you remember my reply
When your high horse dies?

One accuses the other of obnoxious piety, the other of self righteousness.

It’s like two guys jousting with the planks in their eyes.

The song suggests a curious formula though: that one can drown in holy water, i.e. that holiness at a certain volume kills. Just like the sun gives life and takes it. Or how water nourishes and drowns alike.

Entering a cathedral, one does not bath from the font (perhaps for practical . . . but also usefully symbolic reasons), one simply dips.

For that reason, we’ll be saying fuck a lot here.

In fact, I think I’ll say it again: fuck!

[In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell speculated that the utterance would eventually make its way from the streets to the drawing room. Well, Orwell ol’ buddy, your prophesied day has come].

This, to me, seems perfectly consistent with Jesus himself: whose primary opponent was not the pagans but the Pharisees, the ultra-religious of his day.

Would Jesus have argued with Sam Harris (an atheist whose ethics turn out mostly like Jesus) or [insert Christian leader I’m either too craven or temperate to name]. It’s a rhetorical question, because we already know the answer: the latter. While somewhat a false dichotomy [how many actual atheists milled the ancient world?], if Christ argued with stoics, cynics, or any variety of pagan, we lack the record.

But he spent much of his ministry excoriating rabbis, which establishes precedent of what Christ imitation might look like. If Christ was a troll, we’d be a flock of trolls. If he were a conquistador, we’d be conquerors. But he was a critic of the pious try-hards, so we be tossing temple tables.

In an edgy mode, I might even say: anti-piety is a part of Christianity’s source code.

But wait -

You want them all on your side
That just makes more for doubt to slaughter

Wouldn’t that make us just like The Shins?

Thankfully, not judging others is also part of the source code, so the anti-piety must turn inwards. If we whip our eye-plank back and forth, it’s only to battle our own demons.

The fact that Christ challenged the legalists of his day should prompt never-ending self-reflection. Like, “have we allowed spirituality to metastasize into something hideous and life taking?”

Have we made religion a pretty tomb? [And of course, unless you’re a Poe character, you don’t live in a tomb. Therefore, it can stay clean. Outside of vandals, a tomb isn’t messy. It’s formal. A grand structure of stone. Literally lifeless].

Are we missing the mark by really trying to hit the mark? Holiness, after all, is separation. and the Pharisees are the “separated ones.” Jesus, on the other hand, hung out with lepers and sex workers.5

But I get it. The world is appalling. People are appalling. Animal nature is little but endless reproduction and violently recycling each other. Walk on any given subway, and you’ll hear passengers yelling about their genitalia. The appeal of separation is a real appeal – and manifests in odd ways throughout Christian history. My personal favorite were the stylites, who lived atop pillars to take their separation to new heights.

Of course, no one ever talks about the shit – the literal human feces – that had to eventually rain from those pillars! Separation is impossible. We’re all implicated. There’s no living without externalities.

(I also love how some Stylites would yell at each other from their little pillars, like Roman-era Redditors).

I think this is why Mercer calls the musical world “muddy waters.” No one alive avoids the shit – or involvement with it.

These are the muddy waters
I'm swimming in to make a living
Were I to drown in them
It should come as no surprise

And in fact, we’re all going to drown in them.

For what it’s worth, Buddhism and Christianity have a lot in common here. Just like Jesus chided pointless religious gestures – like minimizing footsteps on the Sabbath – the Buddha chided pointless asceticism, like eating only with a blade of grass.6

The narrative of both religious figures involves leaving the palace and entering the 4chan-like, brackish waters of human life, where – if the graffiti of Pompeii is any indicator – Jesus heard a lot of wild shit.

[Pompeii graffiti: “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”]

For the spiritually inclined, I repeat myself, the tasty lure of separation will always swoosh worm-like in the waters, promising to yank you up and out.

Put to its most icy extremes, spiritualism is suicide, a cessation (to the extent that one can cessate) of the animal nature, culminated perhaps in sallekhana: the voluntary starvation death practiced by the Jains.

I feel that, but:

These are the muddy waters
I'm swimming in to make a living

“Make a living” (for me) not in the “occupation” sense, but literally living.

It’s something of a mantra for me these days.

“These are the muddy waters I’m swimming in.”

I might want to do no harm, I may want to minimize my involvement and its collateral harm (and the inevitable human conflicts that arise), but then I’m being more precious about life than God7. We all have to live. And I believe, live well.

Don't ask for his opinion
They ought to drown him in holy water
Will you remember my reply
One finger parallel to the sky?

A finger parallel to the sky is, of course, pointing to the horizon. Mercer is telling his chum to get off his “high horse” and hit the dusty trail. But whatever his intent, he’s also pointing to new destinations. To see life. Try something new. Their conflict need not be the end. They can go places.

Touch the ground and live.

It’s not all indie rock and sad-boy music and feeling abandoned by God around these parts. Sometimes, it’s rocking chairs and sweet tea and woolly exuberance. In fact, as a child I was lulled to sleep with Rascal Flats, Tim McGraw, and Tracy Byrd. And while I haven’t kept up with mainstream country, I’ve been primed for banjos, fiddles, and slapback delay ever since.

This list starts with Cracker Barrel deified – Big Thief’s delightful and earthly-cosmic “Spud Infinity” – and ambles through some of my classic and contemporary favorites, from slacker-country exuberance of Florry to the one-of-a-kind storytelling of MJ Lenderman, not to mention surprises along the way. ^_^

Sometimes I wonder: “if Dante wrote the Inferno now, who would find themselves in hell?” [An odd question coming from me, I know . . .].

In place of Pope Nicholas III - who, while burning upside down in the Divine Comedy assumes Dante’s the next pope in line (LOL) - which of us moderns deserves such a “special” honor?

Personally, I’d vote Kenneth Copeland. I mean, his body’s practically already a condo for the devil.

Most televangelists, really, would make fine tenants of the netherworld: based on their mass exploitation of the vulnerable, shameless deceit, and self-serving empire building1. Not to mention betrayal of the faith. Clearly, they would land in floor eight with the other frauds, putting them two levels below me, up in floor six with the heretics. [Punching down on those floor eights, SMH].

This of course, is an Arcade Fire post, and since Win Butler isn’t here to damn a poor soul, I’ll vote for him and say, “Joe Simpson.” [That is, the father and manager of Jessica Simpson – not the comparatively-innocent mountaineer]. Since Dante organized his torture around disordered love, punishing misaligned passions less severely than malformed intellects (with traitors to family, country, and God damned the worst)2, Win’s “Joe-Simpson-adjacent” character seems a fine enough entry in the chthonic ledger. But we’ll get to that!

Naturally, I believe that any form of hell exists as a tool of redemption (if it exists at all), not of punishment. And Copeland certainly needs redemption. Lots and lots of redemption.

The “body of Christ” needs to flush its tapeworms. But – I bring up this thought experiment for another reason.

Copeland, although especially parasitic and vile, is (unfortunately?) not some cockatrice in the otherwise perfect henhouse we call the world. Good and evil divide every heart, as Solzhenitsyn said. And Satan is god of this joint, if we believe the Bible. So which should surprise us more? That Satan invades the church3? Or that God invades the world? The Kingdom may be leaven worked through the dough, but the dough is still the default state.

I mean, from a biological perspective, love is a pretty recent invention and goodness rather scarce. At a certain level, we’re all just monkeys in dress slacks.

So we should assess our motives. We should never assume the purity of church. If it’s truly the home of God on earth, then it’s the perfect camouflage for evil. Sociopaths love charity. And as the Dhammapada says, “many evil characters and uncontrolled men wear the saffron robe.” [the traditional garb of Buddhist monks, specifically in the Theravada tradition].

So, sadly . . . none of us can punch down. Or at least, not for very long.

Most of us haven’t deluded ourselves, like the character in “(Antichrist Television Blues),” into stage-managing (and low key pimping) our daughter’s pop-career to “bring people to God,” but we justify ourselves in all sorts of similar ways4. To the God in our inmost depths, we’re all spin doctors, laundering the edicts of our ego.

That’s what makes “(Antichrist Television Blues)” so disturbing – and closer to Halloween in my release schedule than billy woods!

“Muhfucka” dealt with God’s world (not our fault, yay!), this one deals with us and what we’re like (boo!).

So, trick or treat, you crazy monsters ^_^

The Song, “(Antichrist Television Blues)”

Back in the Heretic Psalms intro, I mentioned how some songs would “fit in my ideal Bizzaro church.”

Definitely not this one!

That would be creepy as fuck.

[Although, if church started playing bright, propulsive chamber rock, I would not complain].

The whole thing’s a demented prayer, a black mirror (if you will),5 reflecting the narrator’s diseased spirit as he bargains and justifies his actions to God (with the heartland, art-student wispiness of Win Butler). But from the first line, we sense something denatured, cancerous even, about the narrator. Terrified by 09/11 (“I don’t wanna see when the planes hit the ground”), yet sharing the terrorist’s judgment of NYC (“I want to see the cities rust”), he withdraws from work, hoping to profit from his 13 year old daughter’s singing (and sex appeal) instead, pitching this to God as “a good Christian man” and forcing me to reuse that picture of Record Executive Jesus.

Our narrator cloaks his request in religious language, applied like salt and sugar across his plainly self-serving desires. Like in Harry Frankfurt’s legendary On Bullshit, he attempts persuasion without substance, using phrases like “they are the lanterns and you are the light” and “I’ll be your mouthpiece” as if the God-ATM will dispense phat-stacks if you type the correct passwords. This is an appeal to salience, like how beer commercials include smiling women and worship songs the word “fire.”

But honestly, that’s the least of his problems, although I’m thinking God’s more of a Socrates, whiffing that bullshit in a time before central plumbing, than a sophist trafficking in exciting words.

The song gets creepier, the double entendres darker, as the narrator shifts between addressees. Not content to manipulate God with scripture, he manipulates his daughter also, oppressing her into emotional dependence by stoking fear of the secular world:

Little girl, you're old enough to understand
That you'll always be a stranger in a strange, strange land
The men are gonna come while you're fast asleep
So you better just stay close and hold on to me

This could be a whole other article, but we must remember how easily the New Testament’s separation language [“my kingdom is not of this world”] turns pathological. With even a slightly careless reading, religious abusers can fundamentally other the “seculars,” the way elves teach each other about orcs.

Our religious bullshit distorts ourselves before God, yes, but the real danger lies in abuse. Satan loves Sunday. What better pact than living like the devil while feeling like Christ?

And when the daughter IS afraid, he religiously frames this also by aligning skittishness with godliness, forging her spirit with fear. (“You know God loves the sensitive ones").

But of course, in the way of all abusers, the saccharine eventually drops, and he cajoles her to “show the men she’s old for her age.” Even to God, he cuts the sweet religiosity and informs the utmost that “I wanna put it up on the TV screen/ So the world can see what your true word means.” You don’t call a person “it,” unless you only consider them a body, by the way6. How this relates to the gospel in the slightest, no one could tell you, unless the gospel equals exploitation and greed. The best conman believe their own lies, but when the bullshit loses its bullshittiness, we’re left with a hideous man who wants to “hold a mirror up to the world, so that they can see themselves inside my little girl!”

To quote Haruki Murakami’s attempt at 80s teen lingo: major barf bag!7

It’s like the beauty pageant scene in Little Miss Sunshine (or like child beauty pageants in general). Watch it sober; you don’t need the drugs of Hunter S. Thompson to start seeing lizard men in the crowds.

In the end, the “little mocking bird” stages some resistance, so our narrator browbeats her with comparisons to his own meager upbringing, ending with a last wearied prayer, “Oh tell me Lord, am I the antichrist?” I love this line, both for its horrified revelation and cheap hyperbolic obfuscation, the way someone might ask, “Okay, I took your last cookie; what? Am I Hitler?”

Personally, I think both are true. He obfuscates himself just as he finally sees himself.[Accompanied by Regine’s sublime oo-oo-oo background vocals, like beauty breaking through after it’s too late].

But what does that leave for us? Well, clearly you don’t need me to tell you that people appeal to God – and the Bible – for all manner of ungodly things. War. Slavery. Vacations disguised as missions trips. Selling 32 oz sodas.

This is a matter of discernment, but I think it can also be simple: if my actions aren’t alleviating the suffering of others or cultivating healthy community or joy, they probably are not honoring God.

But, that’s just my metric. What would be yours?

Thankfully, we’re dealing less with belief here, as belief complicates things. One could justify almost any action as long as it simultaneously delivered Jesus-related information, much the way old porn (as I’ve heard) would dodge obscenity laws by including a quote from Shakespeare (as the flick would therefore have a non-zero literary or educational value and pass the Miller determination of obscenity).8

Turn your daughter into a product? Well, did people hear about Jesus in the process?

Make me CEO? Well, can’t I demonstrate Christian ethics there?

You get the formula.

Now, it gets dicey with products. Lampooning the “John 3:16” cup is one thing, adjudicating whether any given product “alleviates suffering or cultivates joy” is another. Life is anything but simple. To explore the ethics of every situation exceeds my capacities (and the format of this blog).

But it’s clear we need discernment. To reduce the potential for religious harm (or to boost the reputation of religion), I see two options [and note - this is simply a thought experiment]:

1. Reduce the salience of religious language: therefore making it less persuasive to the vulnerable (although not an option for children and probably not going to happen in general)

2. Increase our discernment, so that we skillfully wield and receive religious information

I work within the second, but I see why some would prefer the first, even though I consider it a losing battle (that requires substantial violence to the human psyche9).

But, perhaps as a final thought –

Arcade Fire bought a church to record Neon Bible: aka, one of the few non-commercial places left in society. Much of the album considers the mutual shaping of culture and the individual10. By consuming TV Christianity, the believer becomes TV Christian-shaped, and the Televangelist now meets a need that only partially existed before. The narrator prays like a Shark Tank pitcher, because we don’t have kings anymore, we have production agencies to make our dreams come fucking true.

If we want a non-consumer Christianity, we should evaluate our consumer thinking in its entirety. I, for one, want to see less scripture on Styrofoam cups. (Or none)!

And because advertisement inherently manipulates, perhaps a less commercial Christianity would create less manipulative prayer.11

But for now, we have “(Antichrist Television Blues)” as a warning. Dante put the frauds just above Satan for a reason. Fraud is protean, manipulating our intellectual and rational infrastructure. But love is simple. Extremely hard, but simple. That, at the very least, gives me hope.

11

For a consideration of “stage-oriented” Christianity vs. “altar-oriented” Christianity, consider Andrew Thrasher’s post about the subject.

Andrew’s Substack

A Memoir of Formation, Part 3

In this third edition of my memoir of formation, the central focus is to integrate some of my academic studies of time and space and make sense of them in light of my story of how I have been formed through participation and practice in the Church. In a sense, this post is about Church Formation just as much as it is about how we may be formed spatially…

Read more

a year ago · Andrew D. Thrasher

Let this Substack be my soapbox, and let me step upon it and declare: Billy Woods is the “The Doom Scroller’s Poet Laureate1, and there are no contenders.”

I mean, even glancing at the Spongebob lyric sheet (a sentence I relish saying), we find ourselves slipping in the muck of:

• Mao Zedong’s triumph over the Kuomintang

• Mugabe’s land reforms

• The murder of Saddam Hussein

• The Atlantic slave trade

• The Battle of Tora Bora

An appealing lyrical quality if you tend to cast your daily life – for example, that work project you’ve been procrastinating on and feel like shit about – like its the battle of Stalingrad.

Billy’s songs, in other words, lend historic terror to daily angst and daily angst to historic terror. Which, I’d say, is basically the experience (and maybe even the impulse) of the doomscroller: the merging of the personal and historic.2

Everything is connected. And it’s not a comforting hippy mantra to say so.

Consider how billy effortlessly links the mundane with societal injustice.

Hangman, one look all it take to take their measurements
My taxes pay police brutality settlements

- billy woods, Year Zero

Lines like these are simple statements of fact – but they’re also couplet-sized compressions of society’s ills. Condensation is definitely the poet’s gift, and woods is one of the best. Through bars like those, he arranges dazzling, impressionistic records. I picture him like Ozymandias with his wall of monitors, able to connect everything in a beautiful, paranoic thread.

Drone warfare, children killed on Tiktok, mass shooters, natural disasters – no one with a smartphone needs billy woods to tell them about these things, but his songs connect independent events and express them in mind-bending ways; they ascribe furious meaning, even while lacking the power to redeem. [Theory about billy’s 2010s popularity boom in the footnotes]3

Much of published poetry has abandoned rhyme, but I’m glad it thrives in rap. Rhyme grants euphony to its message – the satisfaction of ideas clicking together. And if ideas can fit, there’s hope yet for sense making.4

But for those of us cursed to think about theology5, the stakes are higher. The question isn’t “can we make meaning out of our tragedies,” but, “are our tragedies part of a larger theater of meaning?” Is anyone running this thing? Are they good? Do they have a plan? Did they write a nice ending? Since, after all, the meaning of the middle is hopelessly dependent on the end.

Every statement about unjust suffering, implicitly, asks these questions, whether conscious or otherwise.

And for Christians in particular, we call this problem “theodicy” – the question of reconciling a perfect God of love with the reality of evil and suffering. Which, I suppose as well as anything, takes us into this week’s Heretic Psalm. Who better than billy woods to ask it?

The Song, “Spongebob:”

As context, I want to first examine a statement made in “Christine,” a song named after the Stephen King novel (about the murderous car) that depicts multiple auto accidents.

Asleep at the wheel
Gently over the guardrail, flipped heads or tails
One died, she survived
Asked why, I replied, "God's not real"
Ducked the question
In a hospital room full of flowers, I plucked the best one
In a world full of cowards, it's bound to be tension

In a world of car accidents and freak chance, of tragedy and random, pointless deaths, it’s easier to explain life without God (“ducking the question”); or – conversely put –God’s absence EXPAINS the freak catastrophes. If theodicy involves “justifying God to men,” then, to billy, He’s failed.

A similar line occurs in “bigfakelaugh:”

Waited for dad to come home, turned to evenin'
Tree limbs skim the water, the dark deepen
The car swerve, rainy season

In other words, chaos – and the random accidents ensuing from chaos – are just the fabric of life, a part of the physics6.

Before one dismisses this, it’s worth noting that even David Bentley Hart, a theologian who’s written a book about theodicy (The Doors of the Sea), still refers to evil and suffering as the hardest problem facing theists.

And if you’ll pardon a second example, the debate between Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig seems highly relevant.

I’ll summarize it for you:

Hitchens: If God existed, he would be horrible!

Craig: But! You didn’t prove he doesn’t exist!

The tension between those two positions has not ended and maybe never will. Would a God of Love (a God who IS love) create humans through billions of years of death? Then again, do the laws of nature write themselves? Thinkers have argued theodicy since Ignatius of Antioch was in his diapers, so we’re not going to “figure it out” here on Heretic Psalms. But we can think about it. And through thinking, maybe etch out some personal clarity.

In “Spongebob,” we find billy outside of the atheist mode and leveling a formal complaint to the divine [like a good and proper psalm should].

SpongeBob, the whole operation underwater
"It's only one God," what we said in Tora Bora
The bombs was on us, the bombs was on us
Came back to God like, "Muhfucka, you promised, you promised"
- Spongebob, billy woods

But I suppose to understand this complaint, we need to back up a second.

Although uttered by a (fictitious) al-Qaeda member during the US invasion of Afghanistan, this chorus obviously references the promise of God to Noah:

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

- Genesis 9:11

God may have PROMISED not to flood the world, but to billy, “The whole operation underwater.” (And supposedly, is a cartoonish-joke!).

Well, that’s a statement. Clearly, the world has not ended (as far as we know). So, what prompts this absurd accusation?

• Verse 1: slavery, terrorism, despotism (you know . . . the day to day shit)

• Verse 2: the faltering health of wood’s mother told from an overseas call, which eventually drops

“This is hardly a problem for Christians,” one might scoff, “billy clearly is confusing human agency with divine mismanagement.” And that might be so, but we must nevertheless examine our expectations of God, and for that matter, whether it makes sense to try and square every story we hear of him.

How thrilled should we be – for example – that God promises not to “hard-reset” humanity? Everyone (nevertheless) dies, even if not all at once. Every population group perishes 100%. People still strap bombs to children. Billy’s mom is hospitalized. We engineer genocides. We’re subject to disease and death. We get “soft-reset” every generation.

More importantly, if we read the Bible as a literal, perfectly concordant set of texts, we have to assume that before God concocted a plan to save humanity, he was perfectly willing to delete almost all of them.

[Then again, this might just be a problem to someone writing a universalist blog ;P]

And look, I’m probably flapping my widdle wings too high into the thin-thin sky, ready to crash to earth a Marcionite [aka, the heretic who posited YHWH as the gnostic demiurge and Christ the true God] – but before the whole Christ situation, the question of theodicy was a hell of a lot easier.

Just look at Job. After God and Satan make a bet over coffee and cigarettes, Job loses his belongings, children, and health [tell that to the prosperity gospel folk], and for 30 some chapters is like, “yo God, what the fuck?” And God comes down and is like, “bitch, I’m God.”

Problem solved.

So, we might ask, why is the world so filled with suffering?

If we’re going by Job, either to 1) test our devotion (as the bet would indicate), or 2) who the fuck are you to ask that question?!

We pampered moderns – with our sovereigns who have to follow rules7 and our forensic expectations of evidence – demand a bit more before we say fuck that and spend Sunday morning playing Minecraft.

I’ll return to “Spongebob” in a bit, but you can see how Christianity, which posits God as love itself and claims that God will rescue and reconcile humanity, basically invented the question of theodicy in the first place.

So, the “muhfucka” promised.

But promised what?

If Heretic Psalms was Lyric Genius, I would privilege interpretations that couple with the rest of the song (i.e. the promise to Noah or the jihadi promise), but this is a Christian universalist blog, so I’m thinking about things like:

• life coming to all people through Christ [1 Corinthians 15:22 or Titus 2:1]

• or all being perfected in Christ [Colossians 1:27-28]

• that all things will be united to God [Ephesians 1:9-10]

• that, for that matter, Christ came to save the cosmos [John 12:47]

• and so on8

But the cosmos keeps on cosmosing, and the people peopling, and the reconciliation keeps on tarrying. [For 2000 years]. Like Job – it’s fair to be like, “yo God, what the fuck?” All things united? Have you seen the internet? Are the times full enough yet? And like billy, we shouldn’t ignore the broader sense of ABSENCE as people suffer. I can hardly listen to the chorus without thinking: “my god, my god, why have you forsaken me?”

Fortunately, instead of howling along with Christ, we can insulate ourselves with the familiar and carry on undisturbed:

• this world is fallen b/c of sin [therefore, suffering is our fault, not God’s!]

• The kingdom has not yet been consummated. We live in a time outside of time, a shadow of the real. [Therefore, we shouldn’t expect healing here].

But it’s not long before pesky doubts start chewing through.

We cannot blame humanity for natural disasters, diseases, and the untold bloody years of evolution – unless humanity has almost the same power to alter reality as God. By disobeying God, did Adam and Eve create tuberculosis, for example?910

As for the “time outside of time” idea – it’s hopeful (!), but we have to face our current reality, with its tarantula hawk wasps and beg bugs who only reproduce through traumatic insemination, because it’s the only reality we’re sure of. And besides, there’s still the unanswerable question of why the shadow-time at all? “To preserve our free will” isn’t a viable response. Why create endless amounts of extinct species, even if there’s salvation at the end? The story isn’t just about humanity and our supposed liberty – but the suffering of the entire created order. If God created through evolution11 only to strain out a handful of people who believed in Jesus, this is tragic without Hell in the equation, and simply monstrous if it is. God becomes an omniscient Bolshevik, letting humanity play the slots for 70 years before sending them to the Gulag forever.

Monotheists, especially, are in an awkward place of having only one God (“only one God, we said in Tora Bora”): meaning there’s no one else to blame. No dualistic evil deity. No pesky pantheon. Just an omniscient god who started this shit12. Even children intuitively grasp this.

Of course, this formulation assumes that God is a divine engineer who fucked up: that his creation immediately resembled a parody article about post nuclear Chicago, with locals mugging each other in the rubble13.

Well, I won’t say I have some airtight alternative. But I don’t think God is that.

All we have are stories, some fitter than others, some more conforming to our faith tradition than others. I happen to think the following story is both. Personally, I can only palate a Christianity where the world’s suffering is God’s suffering. We’re trained on Sunday to see the cross that way, but to me, the story American Christians tell themselves does not cut it. [But that audacity is for another article].

For now, a brief question: can any modern theodicy succeed if it doesn’t account for everyone? And beyond everyone, the world?

And a second question: can Christianity do this?

I think it can.

Everything comes from God, and, logically then, is part of God (what else would it be?). Therefore, life could be a story about God deleting the unwanted parts of himself, or about creating for creating sake (and letting shit gladiator it out), but Christianity tells us that God is Love and is seeking the lost. These largely constrain our interpretations within the tradition.

Rather than describing a miffed engineer fuming over his misbehaving creation, then, Christianity is a story of all things separated, and eventually reconciled, with God. This makes sense of the many cosmic promises throughout the New Testament (and the kenosis discussed in “Measure Hell With Your Hands”).

If everything eventually is perfect in God, if God becomes all in all as Paul states in 1 Corinthians, then every moment of suffering is also God’s suffering. Every moment informs the divine. The cross was not a one time event, but the shape of the universe.

By making Christ the Logos – a wild development in early Christianity – the New Testament writers positioned the organizing, creative principle of the world AS the dying and resurrecting God. A God willing to die so that the world might exist.

And the entire cosmos, as 7th century theologian Maximus the Confessor would tell us, will be deified through Christ. “The Word of God and God wills eternally and in all to accomplish the mystery of his Incarnation.”

Considering how 1st century Romans would have viewed the Empyrean (the realm of God) and the stellatum (the fixed stars) as unchanging – there’s something almost proto-modern in a worldview where even the universe-creator dies and is reborn (like the stars, and the universe). If that’s true for God, then death is not something to fear at all. Our lives matter, because we’re forged by them. And we should treat everything with dignity, as we’re all divinely connected.

But of course, if it’s bullshit, then who cares?

Nature does not tell us this story. Nature tells us that love is a survival instinct and everything is eventually lost. And yet, in various forms, people believe in Christ.

We talk so much about judgement in the Christian world, but I think it’s totally appropriate – like billy and the Psalmist – to hold God to his promises. To place his heart on a scale and see if it weighs less than a feather. We do not seem to live in a universe managed by love, but Christians must assume that in the end, love wins, and love will change the meaning of everything. In 2025, this probably strikes many as stark nonsense. And perhaps it is. It certainly feels like it some days. But we fools can always love ~ and maybe even finally find out.

[Welcome to Heretic Psalms Special Edition - released on numbers divisible by five - where I write about slightly different shit: general music or theology posts, personal essays, or some combination].

Summer is easily the worst season – and I don’t just mean in the mid-Atlantic, where the damned spend months pressed beneath the devil's sweaty butt cheek – I mean in general. T.S. Elliot was wrong about April. Nothing out-cruels summer.

Pavloved by thirteen (plus) years of education, the American adult enters June expecting summer’s joyous romp. But when the alarm bell rings, they belt-up their seasonally inappropriate office clothes, endure the death-adrenaline of the highway, pretend to work, eat their Tupperware-preserved lunch, and stew on the Severance-esque realization that from here on out, they’ll spend radically more time with their coworkers than their friends and family.

Summer abounds with beautiful smiling people having a beautiful smiling time. Summer is the original Instagram: a 24hr reminder that everyone and every thing is flourishing – except for you.

Simply put, summer is when nature taunts the miserable.

But . . .

Still . . .

Summer occupies 1/4 of any given life in the Northern Hemisphere.

Hating summer, therefore, means hating 1/4 of life.

So, despite my long-held indignation, I set out to at least LIKE the season, if I couldn’t LOVE it. And if I couldn’t like it, to at least ACCEPT IT ON ITS OWN EVIL TERMS.

[In 2020, I made a similar attempt, specifically about my disdain for the beach, which became an essay called, “Swamp Monster in the Temple of Apollo.”1 I am including it here fully, partially because that personal site no longer exists, but mostly so I can be the first human since David Foster Wallace to include an entire essay in a footnote.]

But that 2020 attempt mostly failed, probably because it lacked weed and a heroic dose of Animal Collective. And because human nature is, you know, very hard to change.

This time, I took nine 12-15 mile nature walks (stoned enough to start thinking about God’s puppet show) and proceeded through (mosta) Animal Collective’s discography, aiming for something like hypnotism2 or exposure therapy or – if you prefer to regard your brain as an enemy of the state in need of reprogramming – a benevolent MKUltra.

The Sessions:

• Session 1: Sung Tongs and Merriweather Post Pavilion

• Session 2: Feels and Person Pitch*

• Session 3: Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper* and Strawberry Jam

• Session 4: Tomboy* and Ark

• Session 5: Vanisher, Horizon Scraper*** and Campfire Songs

• Session 6: Sung Tongs and Strawberry Jam

• Session 7: Centipede Hz and Painting With

• Session 8: Isn’t it Now? and Time Skiffs

• Session 9: Reset** and Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished

* = a Panda Bear solo album

** = a Panda Bear & Sonic Boom album

*** = (I know . . . Vanisher is a Quadeca album, but it just came out!)

Did It Succeed?

Eighteen albums later, I want to load up iPod shuffles, package them with THC gummies, and distribute with the zeal of a Jehovah’s witness. I want to have a son, name him Lennox, and make him grateful he didn’t end up as Sung Tongs.

But do I like summer?

That’s a trickier question to answer.

[But first a PSA - don’t use marijuana if your pre-frontal cortex is still developing, kids! Like Edwin Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, do drugs when you’re old.

iPod shuffles for geezers only :P]

Why the Sessions Might Have Worked:

Well, if we’re talking about summer specifically, my problem was associative; as James Clear points out in Atomic Habits, the same cigarette smoke may trigger craving or revulsion, just like the same damp swelter might trigger a party or a depressive retreat.

So, my summer association needed adjusting. In childhood, I associated summer with a three month vacation; in adulthood, with the savage birching of my expectations.

By taking those half-marathon Animal Collective walks, then, I aimed for an adventurous association, perhaps. A light taste of the unknown. A touch of whimsy. Or exuberance. Or the beauty of the instinctual.

At the very least, I hoped to realize what’s out there (by finding new trails and connecting with my area) and to realize what’s in me – in both senses: to discover and to make real.

And so, do I like summer? Perhaps. I see its contradictions, its nourishment and withering heat, its petulant storms and languor, and I respect those contradictions. And its abundance, which chokes the old paths. Perhaps I like it, yes, but that’s less important.

The times were healing. The times were good.

And they became so by stacking as many positives as possible. While this makes poor science – the scientists wants to isolate factors rather than layer them – I am not a scientist; I just want to practice self-care, and overwhelming evidence connects aerobic exercise to positive mental health outcomes. Similarly, nature-time reduces anxiety and depression (the whole “touch grass” thing). I drank hella green tea.

If weed did nothing for me, then the hiking would. And weed makes you spontaneously exuberant, but can you port that exuberance to the rest of your life?

I believe so, yes, but it doesn’t happen automatically.

You need to practice gratitude. You need to train positivity. You need to live a healthy life. Weed is just a tool, not a solution (and if used improperly, can be a detriment). But as James Clear would tell us in Atomic Habits, consistency equals results.

[The parody of “consistent weed” aside – I’m trusting your intelligence here, folks! – I mean consistent nature, consistent walking, consistent intent on improvement. Consistent self-discovery.] Loving life is a life-long practice – especially if it involves loving the parts you hate.

Thoughts on Animal Collective:

Before this summer, I only knew Merriweather Post Pavilion (and maybe you do too), and even then, I mostly knew the towering songs like My Girls or Summertime Clothes – songs impossible to ignore if you have any education in the 00s indie scene.

Those songs alone suggest vast learn-to-like-summer potential, notwithstanding Pitchfork calling their music “from nature itself.”

After my nine sessions, I confirm that these songs embody a smart indie tribalism. A sophisticated primitive. Party-starters from another universe. And for someone who can’t tap their foot without thinking about it, this is a valuable corrective.

Intuition, Your Wicked Christian Heart, and Becoming Like a Child

As a Christian, especially, one learns to distrust their intuition. Contra most feel-good affirmatives, the Christian learns that their heart is deceitful and sick and that the world has a fairy tale logic3: that what’s beautiful is not necessarily good, and what’s good is not necessarily beautiful. Lucifer literally, is the “light bearer.”4 The way of life is through hideous death. The suffering servant – frequently interpreted as Christ – is an uggo.

Especially in the reformation world, the game is over; the faculties are permanently damaged from recognizing the good, and on Sunday, Calvinists sing about being worms. [And did you know that worms eat shit?].

That being said – while I don’t think the “listen to your heart” new-agisms are a complete answer, as we’re quite capable of recognizing our self-deception in the 21st century – I can’t help but notice Christ’s admonition to become like children, and children are not particularly known for their stifling disconnect from intuition (or for their airtight syllogisms). Children, in fact, lack preconceived notions at all.

While I wouldn’t exactly call Animal Collective’s exuberance “childish,” many people might, evidenced by Avery Tare’s shouts or almost-cartoonish vocal inflections (in something like Peacebone), which seemingly have nothing to do with aggression and everything to do with expression for expression sake. Animal Collective embodies this endless experimentation – this almost complete disregard for commercial viability or existing standards (they also embody the success that can accrue when someone follows their unique vision).

So, when Christ commanded the disciples to become like children, he was saying – well, a lot of things, and I don’t presume exhaustivity – that the kingdom embodies a spirit of play, of spontaneous enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake; that the kingdom is best entered by those with little conception of what a kingdom should be.

And it’s children who find the thieves’ treasure in books and movies, because children are the most likely to go off the path.

I’m not saying I particularly like the “be like children” thing; in fact, I – and the pagan philosophical world – would find it much easier if Christ said, “be a rational, sophisticated adult.” Children are not only horrifying, they’re nauseating. Did Christ ever meet a child?

[JK, JK]

But of course, this tension between adult responsibility (“take up your cross”) and childishness exists within Christianity itself. In some ways, it’s the tension between order and chaos, the head and the heart, with denominations preferring one or the other.

I always felt alienated from charismatic Christianity, but the music of Animal Collective – with its deep, droning repetitions, its pop sentiments turned mantras – almost feels custom made to induce a religious experience. It could possibly democratize charismatic Christianity; unquestionably, I would call some of these summer sessions “spiritual,” if not religious.

Regardless, Animal Collective helped me to connect my head with my heart (even a little), and for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t mind church music sounding more like Animal Collective. In fact, in this moment, if church was just stoners carrying an Ark of the Covenant-like, Animal-Collective-Blasting boom box through the woods, that would be fine by me.

[No, definitely not trying to create that super-lucrative cult :P]

The Most Benevolent MK Ultra Loop

Surprisingly, this award goes to “Centipede HZ” and “Painting With.” (“Feels” and “Person Pitch” were my favorites overall, but if I were a benevolent Allen Dulles who wanted that son of a bitch to feel pure love and goodness, I’d probably go with '“Centipede” and “Painting”).

They’re a wonderful mixture of the sincere and avant-garde. A percussion massage to the soul.

They also made me think thoughts like, “If hobos beat me to death while I listened to this, that would be fine.”

Gratuity, Sartre, and Existence as Pure Worship

This is getting to be a long-ass article. But it’s not like you have to read it all. . .

But please, do!

Also, subscribe lols ^_^

In Nausea, Sartre’s first novel (aka, depression in book form), an academic moves to a town for research purposes, and like all academics, quickly loses sanity.

Disconnected from his typical frames-of-reference and finding the past irreconcilably fragmented, his world gains a repulsive, alien character5: all of it accidental and unexplainable. And if it’s accidental, it could just as easily not exist (especially within the gnarled wits of a French existentialist).

But on marijuana

you realize that “accidental” is just the negative valence of “blessing.” Luck is just another side of grace. That the mystics – who see the world as one great unfolding gift – were always right. In this world of forms, nothing “needs” to exist. It’s all gratuitous.

It’s fucking alien, yes.

But profoundly beautiful.

You could see the world like Sartre, as the depressed naturally do, but you can also see the gift. There are dark woods in life where you must cup your hand over the candle-flame of that memory to preserve it.

And then there are times you swear that if you looked a little earlier, you’d glimpse the ground of being itself, the Logos forming the quantum world into static shapes – or if you’re in an iron age mood (or hella blazed), YHWH crushing the head of leviathan6, and you wonder how you ever doubted the life at the heart of things.

[For further discussion on consciousness and its relationship to the world, I recommend Biocentrism, by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman].

The underlying world of particles, after all, would be utterly unrecognizable to us. For starters, almost all of it is empty space. So, when you realize how the world is mentally assembled second by second, you can stand – if you choose to see it that way – with God at the moment of creation.7

Your existence can be an act of pure worship. God can be quoting Jay-Z like, “you could’ve been anywhere in the world, but you’re here with me. I appreciate that.”

And I do. I appreciate it, too.

To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips
I've gone native
I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell
Does this sound simple? Fuck you
Are you for sale?
Does "Fuck you" sound simple enough?

- Sonic Youth, The Sprawl

Know you as well, accursed, how wide and broad and dreary
is the vault of hell, and measure it with your hands! Grip it by the ground—
proceed like that until you know all its circuit and measure it first
from above all the way to the bottom, and how broad is its black breadth.

- Christ and Satan, lines 702-705

“I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell” – I’ve never forgotten that line.

Maybe because I was an impressionable 16 yr old Christian youth when I heard it (with a haircut so bad, I wish time travel was possible). Maybe because it seems so human – this dogged pursuit of foolish extremes – that it stops feeling punk, even as Kim Gordon utters it with her unflappably cool, bad bitch delivery.

With an opening line like that, one expects a sordid parade of down-and-outs: pneumonia patients scrounging for cigarette butts outside the hospital, homeless men waving rusty screwdrivers at the passing cyborgs, meth heads ripping from a cloudy Mickey Mouse pipe while reclining in week-old bath water.

At the very least, I expected Joan Didion-like tales of glamor-less, amyl-nitrite-popping sex, like something from Play it As It Lays.

But – Gordon offers nothing like that.

Bad bitch or not, the vast majority of the lyrics could pass as a television jingle (because they were):

Come on down to the store
You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more

While equating hell with “the store” will certainly delight the socialist among us, it’s not exactly a lot to analyze.

Does this invalidate “The Sprawl” from my typical pontificating?

Of course not! But it does mean I’ll need some bullshit the writing-grace of an Olympic athlete to strike water from that stone.

Regardless, I’m excited to write about “The Sprawl.” I’ve wanted to since encountering it; especially because of the Old English poem, Christ and Satan, which I experienced around the same time. Beneath my horrible haircut, I sensed something potent even then between the two, but alas, I floundered.

But here on Heretic Psalms, I’m finally gonna try and crack that geode open.

(More About) The Song, “The Sprawl”

Come on down to the store
You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more

I’m repeating myself a little, but at first glance, “the store” does not seem to reflect “the exact dimensions of hell.” I reckon even the most ardent anti-capitalist would agree: there are worse eternities than Wal-Mart.

But then again, when has a valid spirituality ever been about buying things?

“The Store” situates us in what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke would call “the having mode” (vs the being mode), which is not just coke and chains and being a material girl in a material world, it’s a possession-based1 orientation towards reality – an expectation that having will resolve the massive tensions within us.

[Hint: it will not].

The having mode also happens to be the logic of empire at its most pathological, as having can only beget having.

In contrast, the Being mode involves transcendence: contacting reality and arriving at a mutual transformation with the world.

For the nerdy, think Sauron (having mode) vs. Tom Bombadil (being mode). For the lit-snobs, think Norman Bombardini in David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System, who hopes to eat enough that he encompasses the whole universe – in other words, by resolving the conflict between self and other by dissolving the other entirely.

I have ambivalent opinions about the market, BUT, from a Christian lens, I am at pains to see agape in it, and since God is agape2, an entirely market-based life would be a form of hell.

Granted – an entirely jigsaw-puzzle-based life or an entirely League of Legends-based life would be forms of hell as well.

Anything would be, for that matter, if it involved eternal, love-less repetition.

Come on down to the store
You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more

Simply put, the having mode – the buying of more and more and more and more – counters Christ: who emptied himself of divinity. Theologians call this concept kenosis, and of course, they argue about its exact meaning, but generally speaking, to fit an omnipotent, universe-creator into a carpenter from Galilee required quite a bit of compression3.

But as that compression will always be a little vague, we could frame kenosis this way: the emperor, typically, does not volunteer to become a slave.

This voluntary emptying isn’t just the opposite of the having mode (and its attendant hell), it affords contact with existence, and for God, a (somewhat paradoxical) point of growth.

[WHOOP, HERESY ALERT]

Yes, monotheists typically conceive of God as omniscient, but let’s step back for a second. Can an eternal being – one who exists in all moments and understands the entire sweep of the universe – empathize with humanity without being human? I don’t just mean the pains of the cross, but our daily humiliations?4

This strange flesh?

Athanasius, a 4th century theologian, said that “God became man that man might become God.” This mutual becoming, to me, is the story of Christianity.

There’s a limitation and expansion – a contact and transformation – that benefits both. In other words, the being mode. [Consider, again, the much different vibe of spirit “possession”].

What’s interesting to me is that Kim Gordon proposes a similar, but ultimately different, contact in “The Sprawl.” In the song’s two verses, she describes an exit from home for the sake of experience. First, the earlier quoted section about nylon slips and hell, and then:

I grew up in a shotgun row sliding down the hill
Out front were the big machines
Steel and rusty now, I guess
Out back was the river
And that big sign down the road
That's where it all started

The “big sign” beckons to another life. Leave Eden, I guess. Or your local shit-hole town. And an exit from comfort will be, definitionally speaking, an entrance into pain.

In Gordon’s case, she wants to know “the exact dimensions of hell.” A desire that reflects what philosophers would call contact epistemology: the theory that to know a thing, you have to touch it, literally or representationally [notes for nerds in the footnotes!].5 Why? For knowledge, presumably. The finding out that only comes from fucking around.

And Kim encounters the market,6 which tolerates slavery to save a few bucks, or at its worst, destroys local ecosystems and drives prostitution, like the Ecuador-based oil industry described by Daniel Pinchbek in Breaking Open the Head.7

To know hell, after all, is to know what we’re capable of, because hell is intrinsically compatible with us.8 And to know its “exact dimensions” is to map the territory, to know the pain of everyone and know there’s nothing worse.

Which brings us back to the quoted “Christ and Satan:”

Know you as well, accursed, how wide and broad and dreary
is the vault of hell, and measure it with your hands! Grip it by the ground—
proceed like that until you know all its circuit and measure it first
from above all the way to the bottom, and how broad is its black breadth.

- Christ and Satan, lines 702-705

Despite being incredibly metal, I’m not necessarily impressed with the poem. Parts are droll, yes. But more importantly, I’m not really enamored with the depicted mafia-God, who makes his enemy shit on the ground at gunpoint and then roll in it.

That being said, I’m interested in how it connects to “The Sprawl” – for two reasons:

1. As a springboard to think about hell

2. The parallel between Christ and Satan

When thinking about “Christ taking on the sins of the world,” it really begs the question: just how different is this from Satan, cursed (by ancient Britons) to measure all of hell?

There are three models here:

1. Kim Gordon, who decides to measure hell herself – and, if we accept the definition of hell as “the absence of God,” to contact everywhere God is not.

2. Satan, who is punished to do so

3. Christ, a god who “becomes” sin9, is separated from God, and descends into hell to free the captives there.

The way I see it – and this is something I will explore over the course of many more posts – the main difference here is direction. Satan desires dominion, an orientation that invariably leads to suffering, as it reduces others to manipulatable objects. [And Gordon, by seeking hell, finds this]. To correct Satan’s view, he is cursed to experience pain. And I believe – although its nowhere in the poem – that this pain builds empathy, and empathy leads to God. Framed this way, hell is a chastisement that leads to God, as the punishments of a loving father are always chastisements10.

In contrast, Christ volunteers for hell to reach those in hell: not just in the “harrowing” mentioned in the Apostles Creed but by entering a world of guaranteed suffering: one of disease and death and everything recycling everything. Whether or not we call it hell, to a god, it might as well be.

And Christ does not just touch the leper’s hand, as it were, he becomes the kind of creature that can have leprosy at all.

The promise of Christianity - whether it proves true or not - is that God will enter every part of Hell to heal the lost, and in the end, God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), with the entire cosmos11 reconciled (2 Cor 5:19).

[The “universe” in the whole “universalist” thing].

Which, if you’ll permit a bit of speculation -

In the salvation story, Christ surrender’s first to God’s will. Satan surrenders last. The rest of us are somewhere in the middle. [And by “will,” I mean loving others, ruling through serving. Sacrificing dominion and possession to heal the world.]

As means of illustration of this “middle,” I once heard a man on public transportation tell someone (after a long session of yelling), “One day, you’ll feel everything that I feel.”

Ominous!

I don’t want to feel everything he feels – I mostly want to feel NOTHING that he feels – which is why I’m not very Christ like. One cannot heal suffering without feeling it, and most of the time, I’d rather not. To the degree that I want to be like Christ, I understand the temptation of Satan.

But I guess the whole bling and coke thing – or the soccer mom version – will always get more likes and subscriptions than the whole “die to ourselves” thing. This is not just inevitable, it’s part of the human story. Something we all go through.

The question is whether we can transform our suffering – or if we’re just measuring for the hell of it. I am interested in the former, although I often wish I wasn’t. But if, like Dante, we must go through hell, then it matters what we make of it.

I missed brat summer. Like, completely. In fact, Charli declared it finito almost exactly a year ago. But, for the hipsters like me,1 emerging from the forest and clicking that chartreuse album cover for the first time: BRAT SUMMER LIVES ON.2

The discourse poured strong last year (I enjoyed this article from Under the Paving Stones about it), with seemingly everything said that could be said about the phenomenon, with its generational production and raw, journal-entry-like lyrics, which prompted TikTok trends and mass self-identification with being “brat.”

All that could have just been last year’s fad, except for you know, Rolling Stone listing it as the 35th BEST ALBUMOF THE 21st CENTURY so far (!)3.

Brat was (or seems to be) that rare constellation of momentary hype and enduring quality. I’m an outsider to the genre, but even I can tell it’s fucking good. I’d maybe even call it the dance-pop Kind of Blue – an album celebrated by genre-heads and accessible to casual listeners – except, a Kind of Blue with genius marketing/branding, specifically that single-word-cover almost begging for a movement.4

By presenting her isolated feelings as a general type, Charli allowed others to see themselves in her insecurities – and seize the gauntlet of her girl boss powers.

This becomes especially evident when lining up her album covers:

The average listener can enjoy Pop 2 or Charli, but that doesn’t mean they’ll feel like a cute diva or hot weirdo. How I’m Feeling Now may have been produced during six weeks of covid quarantine, but it’s still a stunt: a manic burst of workmanship that’s completely obfuscated by the clean and casually sexy cover.5 I mean, 2020-me spent years in the woods, listening to Tom Waits and eating grass like Nebuchadnezzar. How could I relate?

I’m not a club beat maker. But am I Brat? Idk, I mean, probably not, but I can see how a lot of people could imbibe its energy. It’s kind of how “gangster” can morph beyond the literal and stretch onto any sort of struggle or resistance, no matter how seemingly nerdy or incompatible6.

Ultimately, the identity here isn’t mine, but that’s not the point. Brat – at least for a moment – connected and empowered people. And amidst the vulnerability and strutting of Brat, I DID relate to Sympathy is a Knife and the potent theological question it raises.

Why I wanna buy a gun
Why I wanna shoot myself
Volatilе at war with my dialogue
I'd say that there was a God if thеy could stop this
Wild voice tearin' me apart

Should we expect God to heal our internal divisions? To quell our despair? Is it bratty to expect so? And is identity enough? What affords actual inner coherence? These questions really weren’t a part of Brat summer (as far as I know), but they’re vital to me.

And considering the Genius annotation only says:

I see my narrow theological lane has room for filling!

(But first, let’s step back a bit).

The Song, “Sympathy is a Knife.”

Sometimes on YouTube comments, I’ll see some iteration of: how can Charli write such deep lyrics over such sick beats?

I have to (respectfully) disagree, and I think Charli would as well7. The appeal of her writing isn’t depth: it’s immediacy. Basic fears, insecurities. Confidences. Ripped leggings. Feeling messy. Again, you don’t need to be a club princess to feel like a bad bitch, because even the bad bitch feels the exact shitty spectrum of feelings you feel8.

Most people’s minds are not a serene ocean with monsters safely in the depths. Most people are on the shore sipping Mai Tais, watching kraken tentacles thrash the beach.

I don't wanna share this space
I don't wanna force a smile
This one girl taps my insecurities
Don't know if it's real or if I'm spiraling

And then later, the chorus:

'Cause I couldn't even be her if I tried (Why?)
I'm opposite, I'm on the other side (Why?)
I feel all these feelings I can't control (Why?)
Oh no, don't know why

This is all surface.

But that’s what makes it so relatable and conceptually unsettling, especially with the syllables spaced out over such cutting, titanic production.

I don’t typically think of insecurities as a site of spiritual warfare, but Charli goes there: she drags God into it, and not in a cheap, could-just-be-a-healthy-American-exclamation9 kind of way either.

After discussing her doubts – and how she both wants sympathy but can’t even receive it without doubt and pain (a hell of isolation, really) – the beat falls out; the kind of drop that makes you check if your headphones are only-half plugged in.

From that kinda-silent, broken-sounding production, she asks:

Why I wanna buy a gun
Why I wanna shoot myself
Volatilе at war with my dialogue
I'd say that there was a God if thеy could stop this
Wild voice tearin' me apart

This definitely echoed the psalms for me, with their constant talk of surrounding enemies and God’s abandonment. Only here – the enemies are within.

Of course, this raises a “David Foster Wallace - This is Water” type dilemma as well (pertinent example in footnotes)10: if her anxiety magically quelled in response to her challenge – if a heroin-smooth, peace-that-passes-understanding descended on her nervous system, what would that ultimately prove?

Well, that depends on what you believe.

But - if we take Charli at her word - it would prove there’s a God, presumably because the “wild voice” is THAT WILD.

Notice, she doesn’t say, “I’d say Wellbutrin works, if it could stop this voice.”

(Or psychiatry. Or aerobic exercise. Or hot yoga).

Of course, all of the other options would make significantly less poetic lyrics - and much different questions. Charli’s essentially asking for the (seemingly) impossible, otherwise she’d just ask for talk therapy and meds.11

And while Charli doesn’t specify the agent of action here (after all, it’s not a binary; a “God” could silence the voice through any of those examples), I’m interested in why one invokes God – or pursues God – at all. If the divine can’t make you want to live, what good is it? Granted, God is much more than a big, cosmically effective Prozac, but it’s a start.

Some would probably deride this as “moral therapeutic deism” – typically a pejorative implying that religion lacks substance beyond making you happy and ethical – but I would paraphrase Epicurus in response: “Vain is the word of religion which does not heal any suffering of man.”

[And do you know how hard it is to make people happy?]

This harkens back to the original meaning of religion: binding, which of course refers to the acolyte’s relationship with the sacred order, but also analogically to a book binding, the structural holding together of meaning.

The desire to feel good, to feel secure, isn’t just some frivolous happiness – the substanceless water replacing the shocking blood of Christ – it’s a belief in the future, of horizons. The desire to live is joy, yes, but also an act of faith: that existence, despite its attendant horrors, is worth it.

This seems especially clear when considering Satan as the force of void, best expressed by Goethe in Faust:

MEPHISTOPHELES: I am the spirit of perpetual negation;
And rightly so, for all things that exist
Deserve to perish, and would not be missed—
Much better it would be if nothing were
Brought into being. Thus, what you men call
Destruction, sin, evil in short, is all
My sphere, the element I most prefer.

While extremely low resolution, we can posit “God” in opposition: as the force that generates and encourages Being. And by encourages, I mean in the colloquial way (to comfort or prompt) but also literally (to fill with courage).

This brings two questions to mind:

1. In our post-God society, why pursue God at all?

2. If we choose church, what sort of healing should we plausibly expect? In other words, is that “Wild Voice” the business of the church? Is the church still the hospital for souls? And if it isn’t, what does that imply?

I lack the scope to fully answer either, but I will probe the questions.

People deconstruct for many reasons: hypocrisy in the church, scandal, the growing distance between evolution and American theism, the doctrinal narrowness of the same. But some deconstruct because they want something potent, not just a polite song and a wafer – or because the distance between the God we praise and the pain of the average life is so wide, they fall on through.

[Comment on despair in the footnotes].12

Personally, I found both to be true: my profoundest (and most healing) spiritual experiences happened outside the church, and the church could not explain the modern world. I write this post-flight from religion, but with an interest in returning, nonetheless.

Religion has ceased to bind, in both good and bad ways. We are no longer held to its principles, but simultaneously, it no longer holds us together.13 Why choose to be bound, then?

Well, many choose not to, and that’s valid. I don’t think it’s “bratty” to expect something basic from God as hope and internal healing. The church often promotes positivity while lacking the power of integration, simultaneously fearing what it cannot explain or control. But the church is not monolithic, of course, nor does either observation have to be the case.

In real life, we’ll never have the certainty of “Sympathy is a Knife.” We’ll never disambiguate God from nature, even if we prayed and never felt anxious again. It’s “This is Water” all the way down. Therefore, we should be interested in what works, wherever it comes from. But I believe the tools work better with a toolbelt, and religion can be the meaning structure that orients the therapeutic.

Christianity tells us that the highest power serves others and is willing even to die if others might live. I think that’s worth preserving.

The 21st century west lacks a vital myth, but as a culture, we can revitalize it. Of course, it must pull together our infinitely fractured society without falling into simple tribalism (Brat included). It must respond to science and other faiths, rather than retreating from them. The church has expanded to new knowledge in the past – such as its rediscovery of Aristotle in the Middle Ages – and we’re clearly in a similar moment now. The newly bound religion requires more pages.

This is a collective effort. Because it’s a fucking huge effort.

And I like Rilke’s formulation of God as “the future one:” something that does not yet fully exist but will. In Letters to a Young Poet, the Austrian challenged his interlocutor’s unbelief by asking, “Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?" He then exhorts him to, "live your life like a painful and beautiful day in a great gestation"(p. 49).14

God is not God without us, just like we are not people without God. [In Orthodox terms, the “body of Christ” is not yet “consummated.” The full reality of Christ as a super-being composed of humanity, the final reality of the Logos, is not yet complete]. And we need people to build a plumbing system, let alone God.

Christianity has morphed countless times, and it will morph again. The whole dying and rising again thing, well, it’s kinda Christ’s whole thing.

I’m interested in an antidepressant Christianity: a religion that engenders joy and hope, that allows for play, and that fosters connection: one that maps the individual to the world.

In some senses, this does boil down to “feeling good,” but I’d argue, we do almost everything to modify our emotions, and managing angst is why we pursue anything higher, including religion. Here, the borders between feeling good and contacting Reality run watery. Living Well is not about avoiding hardships but a belief that peace and integration are even possible. That life, again, is good, which might require faith to ever actually believe.

Anxiety is a compass pointing us to worse realities – but obversely – better ones too.

This is the tension within Christianity: the “work” is done on the cross, but the problems remain. We are both complete and radically incomplete, set to “work out our salvation.”

I’m in this process myself, but some things I think are worth pursuing:

• A religious community - people truly trying to live deeply and lovingly

• Traveling as an act of faith: believing the world is worth seeing and that by leaving the village walls, I’ll encounter something worthwhile

• Creating – and working with higher intelligence by doing so

• Loving myself and others - both proving that people are worthy of love and participating in Agape, which brings the humanity out of the animal15.

None of these guarantee a God on the other end. But if we find love – and if we love our lives – is there a difference?

6

Like Kevin G in Mean Girls, a rapper and mathlete. A joke, sure possibly, but also real to life. Rap can map to any sort of struggle/grind. I’m not in the position to say whether this is “good” or not, but it certainly has expanded the appeal and dominance of the genre.

My first car had no aux. No USB. No Bluetooth. It had a CD player1, and when the CD player died, I listened to the radio, until the speakers died, and then I tapped the steering wheel in silence like a serial killer (or Twenty One Pilots). [Same car now actually, *laughs-cries*].

But during my fleeting radio days, I loved the Sunday morning alternative “Acoustic Hangover” set. Next to cuts from Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album and Hotel Yorba, “Jesus Christ” was a Sunday morning regular, despite the screaming at the end.

While they regrettably never played any Elvis Costello demos (sparse and perfect for a migraine and early morning self-inventory), I think [insert US city’s alternative radio station] really nailed it with “Jesus Christ.”2

Brand New, after all, had a real gestalt – like that old viral dress of disputed color:

Were their songs startlingly Christian?

Or just telling Christ to fuck off?

Or both?

This ambiguity, IMO, was their super power and a real audience-draw: reaching lost kids coming in – and out – of the gate.3

This isn’t totally unique, of course. If you want your music to talk Bible, emo is your genre. Whether they were actually Christian, like emo pioneers (and Pitchfork darlings) Sunny Day Real Estate, or whether they poked at Christianity’s seams like Cursive or Modest Mouse, their attention implied importance, even after the complete evaporation of belief. And this makes sense. Broadly speaking, emo is a genre about fucking up (or things being fucked up), of everything felt at an urgent pitch. Not a bad pairing for Christianity, which teaches that, well, the world is fucked up (and an emergency).

But none of them ride the line between supplication and separation better than Brand New.

“I used to be such a burning example,” Lacey sings at the beginning of The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. And later, “I used to pray like God was listening, I used to make my parent’s proud” (Millstone). All sentiments, it turns out, that many, many deconstructing kids could relate to.

But in The Devil and God, Christianity – as subject and recurring theme – grants Lacey’s emo fuckedupness a biblical gravitas: the pathos of the damned4.

In fact, without Jesus, Brand New would be nothing!

Nothing noteworthy, anyway.

“Without me kid,” *Record Executive Jesus turns his La Croix to wine and gives it an emphatic swirl*, “you’d still be bleating about your last breakup!”

Before releasing (what many consider to be) the greatest emo album of all time, Brand New were a relatively interchangeable pop-punk band singing about relatively interchangeable pop-punk band things (drugs, resentment, girls, self-destructive behavior, resentment about girls, etc). But The Devil and God slams these themes into a world of consequences. With the death of a 7 year old girl in Limousine (MS Rebridge), for example, irresponsible behavior like drunk driving (alluded to in Sowing Season) is transfigured into failure requiring ultimate language: something even Jesus won’t forgive. This hyperbole could have easily flopped, but the atmosphere is desolate, the song structure thrilling, the theology jagged like a shiv.

Few bands convince me of their isolation or condemnation like Brand New. Actually, I’d even argue that to find a suitable evolution from teeny-boppers to artistes, you’d have to turn to the Beatles, which . . . sounds like a stretch, right?

(Maybe to believe me, listen to Your Favorite Weapon followed by The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me – or at least sample them).

Except again, not like the Beatles. If someone writes lines like:

I'm my own stone around my neck
Be my breath, there's nothing I wouldn't give

- Millstone

the last thing they want to imagine is no heaven!

[Same with metal, an adjacent genre. No heaven/hell = nothing to rebel against, nothing to secretly hope for. No heaven/hell = all your bats and shit are irrelevant. Metal, in this way, is the anti-Lennon].5

Clearly, something changed. What exactly, this essay does not hazard to say, but by the time of Devil and God, Lacey had reached artistic and theological brilliance.

The Song, “Jesus Christ”

For example –

The subject of this essay, “Jesus Christ,” is one of the most startling, illusion-less confessions I’ve ever heard.

Considering, you know, its singer states he’d not only fail to recognize the second coming of Christ, he’d nail him back up.

Not that he wants to, but we’ll get to that.

In this way, “Jesus Christ” makes the hymn “Were You There” look utterly smug and accusatory:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

[Throughout the hymn, the speaker never actually confesses to anything, or even emphasizes their own involvement (active, passive, or otherwise); the song shifts all attention to the listener. Were you there, when they crucified my Lord? It’s like, “heard you got caught up in bystander effect, SCOTT, and did utterly jack shit.”]

The thing is though, Lacey’s confession isn’t that metal, really. Strains of Christian thought mirror the exact sentiment: that we all crucified Christ6 – that Nietzsche’s right; we all have God’s blood on our hands. But I imagine few worship leaders want song-writer credits on that one.

I know you'll come in the night like a thief
But I’ve had some time alone, to hone my lying technique
I know you think that I’m someone you can trust
But I’m scared I’ll get scared and I swear I’ll try to nail you back up
So do you think that we could work out a sign?
So I’ll know it's you, and that it's over so I won't even try
I know you'll come for the people like me

But we all got wood and nails
We turn, turn out hate in factories
Yeah, we all got wood and nails
We turn, turn out hate in factories
We all got wood and nails
And we sleep inside of this machine
- “Jesus Christ”

You’ve got wood and nails, but –

wait a second, you want what?

“ONLY A WICKED AND ADULTEROUS GENERATION SEEKS A SIGN!”

(. . . is what I imagine a fundamentalist is squawking somewhere).

But kids, this is why we don’t read the Bible like a fundamentalist.

I mean, to turn Saul around, Christ literally appeared in deified form and knocked him off his horse.7

If that’s not a “sign,” I don’t know what is!

Paul calls himself the chief of sinners, and this isn’t self-flagellation. The chief of sinners GOES OUT OF HIS WAY TO KILL CHRIST (or in Paul’s case, anyone Christ-like he could get)8. Is this the kind of person who can be saved? And if that guy can be saved, who can’t?

This is Lacey’s question, after all.

Across The Devil and God, Lacey is basically saying, ‘yeah I don’t believe, yeah I’m fucking destroying my self, but aren’t I the kind of person you came to save? Like the exact reason you came here? So save me.’

Many would balk, ‘of course Lacey (or someone like him) should be damned. We all deserve damnation, let alone someone as flawed as him’9. However, I ask you to consider the following:

1. The Bible states that humanity is lost in darkness. Darkness born and darkness raised. No exceptions.

2. Is it fair, then, to judge darkness-dwellers for not recognizing the light? (or, forget fair, is it reasonable to expect them to?).

Conversations around original sin typically revolve around inherited guilt and justice. Adam and Eve sinned, and like convict’s children in North Korea, we’re guilty also. But here, the question is one of recognition – of limited faculties. Should we judge Plato’s cave dwellers for not understanding the world? Or deep sea fish for not understanding the sun?

The feeling I get listening to The Devil and God is like, ‘You told us what we’re like. You fucking made us. We’re the kind of insect that tortures kids and buries them in the basement. We’re the test-subjects that build Auschwitz when the instructor leaves the room. You expect us to recognize you?’

To the nods of evangelicals, Lacey affirms his depravity and need for salvation. But simultaneously, his affirmation suggests serious questions about Christ’s selection method.

1. If you came to save the lost, like you claim you did –

2. Why am I too lost?

3. In other words, why pick and choose the lost?

4. And if you’re going to pick and choose, why along such arbitrary lines as belief in something that happened 2000 years ago?

There are knee-jerk theological answers, but try to limit them if you can.

By addressing Christ without belief, he calls his bluff. (Well, the evangelical Christ’s bluff).

He’s like, ‘I don’t want to be damned. But I know what I’m like. I’m not going to recognize you. So what are we going to do about it?’ And I mean, why would we recognize Jesus? The only time God became human – if Christianity is true – we executed him as soon as we could.

Jesse’s cry for salvation is also a statement of doubt: doubt in the good for not revealing itself, doubt in our ability to recognize it – doubt in a salvation plan that requires us.

Cause God knows what we’re like!

We’re the weak link in the operation.

Calvinists understand this. But by believing in a God who predestines souls to hell, they render God an unimaginable tyrant. In response, Arminians attempt to salvage God’s morality – but render salvation random in the process, since belief is contingent on a thousand factors.10

But would Jesus (who spoke of mustard seed-sized faith sufficing) turn a beggar like Lacey away? “At the gate, does Thomas ask to see my hands?” Do we all have to be Christ to be saved?

The answer to the last is harder to answer. But yes, I do think it’s enough.

While I differ in my conception of “depravity,” I agree that humanity is lost (feeling out of place in the world is kind of just our thing); I’m a universalist because, assuming a God that is goodness itself, I believe the rescue mission only makes sense in totality. But since we see through a glass that God made translucent, if not opaque [we operate on such little knowledge, all of us figuring the world in our brief time here] – I do not know if there is a God, or if God will save everyone, but if God is love as Christianity claims, then I believe he will. Love finds all the sheep, no matter how many lifetimes it takes.

Even me.

Even scumbags like Jesse Lacey.

Any other gospel is not the gospel, because any other news would not be good news.

For the casual reader, I want to begin this series with totally normal band Neutral Milk Hotel and their totally normal lyrics about semen-stained mountain tops and pickled fetuses.

[If those don’t grab you, they also have one about a hung guy kissing a fish]1.

If you know Neutral Milk Hotel, you know these songs are SO MUCH MORE than their odd bits.

But if you’ve only ever heard “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (maybe literally right now?) – a gorgeous, non-unsettling song – then it’s worth situating its exultant beauty within the band’s unpredictable (and often unsettling) vision.

An artist’s artist, lead singer Jeff Mangum at least seems completely unworried about the critics, willing to belt out “I Love You Jesus Christ” right in the middle of a perfectly serviceable three-part indie rock epic – if the project calls for it.

For like, forty-four seconds. . . (!)

Talk about Christ being a stumbling block! That’s never going on a playlist!2

[But no, it’s ballsy as fuck, considering how uncool it is. In fact, Jeff Mangum’s total lack of irony has not only endeared him to legions, it’s fashioned a different strain of hipster cool. His songs suggest a horse-shoe where total freedom of expression is just as cool as, well, actually being cool]:

Poor3 Jesus aside, these lines are hardly cherry picked. Suffocating lovers, dissolving dogs, babies in the trash. Mangum rattles these off with ease, yes, but he also scatters them within songs of profound empathy and love. With Neutral Milk Hotel, the sublime and unsettling, the beautiful and hideous, march hand in gnarled hand: like William Blake’s Song’s of Innocence and Experience couldn’t bother to be separated.

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening, 1945

- Holland, 1945

[Amazing lyrical economy, IMO]

And then later,

And here's where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions4 in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces filled with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

- Holland, 1945

Sex and death bed together here, like an LSD vision of a lover rotting and reconstituting in real time.

WHICH, considering his song-writing process, MAKES A WHOLE HELL OF A LOT OF SENSE. A somnambulist and vision-prone, his process sounds liquid, verging on automatic and dipping amply into the unconscious.5

A lot of the songs on Aeroplane really freaked me out, and it took other people to make me be comfortable with them, and to see that it was okay to sing about a lot of this stuff, not to shut them inside. . .
It took me awhile to figure out that the songs were positive, not just these fucked-up nightmares that I was throwing up.

- Jeff Mangum, 1997 Puncture Interview [archived by Pitchfork]

I tarry here because the songs are so beautiful and energetic, the instrumentation so antique and alien6 (those musical saws!), that listeners might blur the weird bits, especially since the title track mostly flies above them.

The Song, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”

A love song and ghost story in one, “Aeroplane” is a psalm of praise: pure rapture and and wonder and gratitude for living, triggered by a beautiful soul who shared the same planet.

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all 'round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

- In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

A robust, anti-fragile P.O.V. at any time, propelled7 to mystic heights by its surrounding subject matter: Anne Frank and the Holocaust.

What a curious life
We have found here tonight
There is music that sounds from the street
There are lights in the clouds
Anna's ghost all around
Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me

- In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Anna’s ghost . . .

Anna.

While common knowledge/mythology now, “Aeroplane” is a concept album about Anne8 Frank: her extinguishing, her lovely soul, and the speaker’s admiration of her.

Yes . . .

I know how it sounds.

I tried explaining this album to a co-worker once, the kind of curmudgeon whose rock-autopsy’s TOD is somewhere in the 80s, and he literally snorted with derision.

Anne was at most 16 before she died, making a “love” for her (“the only girl I’ve ever loved?”) suspect: potentially creepy, almost certainly cringe.

But – I really don’t think it’s like that.

A dreamy youth who was rapidly becoming a serious young man, Mangum realized that he had lived most of his life in fantasy and decided to educate himself. At random, he chose “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and it broke him. (Full interview quote in footnotes).9

So, it’s less about Anne Frank – “about” implies its a rock opera – it’s more inspired by her. And I mean inspired in the old, literal meaning: the in-spiriting of God, or a god, or a ghost. It’s a mind merge. Reading her diary dropped Anne’s life and personality into Mangum’s incredibly fertile imagination. “Aeroplane,” therefore, is a dream generated from a mind with maximum potential and minimum extraneous input.

[For the ultimate NMH experience, I recommend listening to the audiobook of Anne’s diary sometime – except, not at work like I did, unless you too want to blubber at your cubicle].

Maybe you would feel otherwise, but to me, an encounter with Anne Frank is an encounter with essential human goodness.

I mean, throughout her diary, she reiterates her belief in humanity and the beauty of life, ALL WHILE JACKBOOT THUGS WERE COMBING AMSTERDAM TO EXTERMINATE HER AND EVERYONE LIKE HER.

So, was she naive?

I don’t think so – although the reasons why will unfold over this series – but who couldn't love a soul like that? I don’t mean romantically, I mean totally?

So, the loss of Anne Frank is a double loss:

1. of her precocious, just-budding life

2. of the millions she represents

Someone might revere psychologist Victor Frankl (or someone like him) for what he did: i.e. for his post-Auschwitz opus “Man’s Search for Meaning,” but readers mostly love Anne for who she was. To love her, as Jeff Mangum did, is to find your love expanding for the whole.

We find, then, Anne’s love for life in spite of life mirrored in Mangum’s “Aeroplane:”

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all 'round the sun
And when we meet on a cloud
I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see
Can't believe
How strange it is to be anything at all

- In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

To be anything at all. This is a love deeper than religion, and any religion worth anything aims to cultivate it. To be in that aeroplane is wonderful and miraculous and terrible, a marvel of order (however temporary) over a sea of chaos.

Nihilism costs nothing this century. And the nihilists might have fun for a while, but do they love life? I know I didn’t.

Anne Frank and Jeff Mangum – in contrast – look darkness in the eye without the wilting of joy.

If God exists, he has a lot to answer for, and we seriously have to question whether 1) love is the highest power as the Bible claims, 2) love will win in the end.

If God doesn’t exist, can we hope that goodness – just an evolutionary byproduct meant for survival – has any hope against the untold eons of slaughter (of which goodness is simply just another part!)?

Well, for now, I’ll say –

It matters who/what your ideal is. Who your “god” is.

Some “gods” value Anne Frank, some don’t.

Some societies would publish Anne Frank’s diary and make it a classic. Others wouldn’t. Would pre-Christian Rome have valued Anne Frank or published her diary (in other words, the diary of a conquered victim)? Well, that’s a leading question obviously, with a less obvious answer. (And is a counterfactual that requires many other factors like mass literacy and printing presses). So, I’m not sure.

But “Aeroplane” certainly resonates with otherwise jaded people, even that hallmarky bit about meeting in the clouds at the end. Fandom speaks louder than cynicism, and I’m a fan. I’m moved. And to the degree that I’m Christian, I believe it too.

[And for anyone who think Anne Frank’s burning in hell, I prescribe the same treatment I’d prescribe our current president: enough psilocybin that you retire from your worldly activities and move to a commune, where you spend your days washing dishes and painting a thousand puppies like George W. Bush].

[Make sure you listen to Neutral Milk Hotel in your therapy]!

What’s a Heretic Psalm?

Simply put, these are songs from beyond the cathedral. Songs that – to me – reveal a spiritual truth (often a very Christian truth!) in unexpected places. Some of them might fit in my ideal Bizzaro church: a chapel that opens Sunday morning with Sonic Youth and Bright Eyes.

But since I have no cultish aspirations (sadly, since that would surely prove far more lucrative) I’ve chosen to simply write about these “heretic psalms” instead.

One may balk, but remember the biblical standard for a psalmist: a rapist and murderer who sang about dashing babies on the rocks.

(I mean . . . can you imagine a congregation singing that shit?)

True. That classic psalm reflects our lesser angels well, but I’m interested in different, higher truths.

My goals for this blog are few and modest:

1. create a perfect union of art and theology.

2. heal the internal divisions within myself.

But if those fail, as they very well might:

3. write the best music blog I can

I can’t guarantee a complete homogeneity in these posts. Some may dip into music, only to soar into theology like a sea hawk grasping a fish.

Many may simply be “my god, my god, why have you forsaken me?”

But then, guess what? We’re quoting Christ.

A number of the artists here – Modest Mouse, Brand New, The Mountain Goats, Father John Misty, etc. – write gateway songs: they find you on your way out of religion, and on you way back in. The same music that helps one tear down, oddly enough, can also help rebuild. In our low places, music is there, helping define what we cannot define. The baffled king somehow composes hallelujah.

Okay, but what up with the whole heretic thing?

Well, it doesn't help that my favorite theologian had his tongue and right hand cut off for his ideas.

Yikes.

But really, the formulation here is quite straightforward. The Second Council of Constantinople states:

If anyone does not anathematize Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, Apollinarius, Nestorius, Eutyches and Origen, as well as their heretical books, and also all other heretics who have already been condemned and anathematized by the holy, catholic and apostolic church and by the four holy synods which have already been mentioned, and also all those who have thought or now think in the same way as the aforesaid heretics and who persist in their error even to death: let him be anathema. (section 11)

I do not anathematize Origen for his universalism1, therefore I am anathema.

Well, shit!

In fact, I think the church missed the mark in doing so. Heretic Psalms comes from this perspective.2

But putting belief aside – because I don’t actually think belief matters the way evangelicals think it does (and I, as an evangelical, thought it did) – the syntax of my brain is Christian, and to the extent that it’s Christian, it’s Universalist. Depending on the day, I’d also accept Christian Pantheist, Christian Atheist, or Christian Taoist. [There’s a compound noun for every season!]

Clearly, we left the ranch miles ago. Or at least, the American one.

Originally, I titled this blog “21st century Psalms:” a name drawn from a long-held conviction that modern Christian music is flat and watery and is spectacularly failing to meet people where they are: i.e. deconstructing in droves. But I want to take the poison right away. Accept the label from the start.

I have to admit though – I don’t feel in the worst company. Quaker and Methodist were slurs too, eventually adapted by their practitioners, just like the term “Christian.”

The first known depiction of Jesus after all – the Alexamenos Graffito – is a mockery!

If Christianity seems entirely reasonable (or without question) then you’ve probably lost touch with its abject strangeness. We can thank the withdrawal of Christian hegemony, marshaled by the scientific and secular dismissal of Christianity as foolish, for paradoxically (!) creating the conditions for real belief.

Underneath the topsoil of cultural respectability, I’d argue, hasn’t Christ always been the fool who’s also king? The last who’s also first? The alpha and omega?

Finally – and I don’t want to dawdle too long here – “heretic” belies a care for the church: at least enough to orient myself by its definitions. Here, I’m willing to be Pluto in the fringe orbit of the sun, sometimes a planet, sometimes not. And perhaps, because of this icy distance, more equipped to hear those other galaxies.

So. “Heretic Psalms.”

It’s a name.

Perhaps not the worst Christian name ever. I take solace in the Puritan preacher "Praise-God Barebone," whose name sounds like urban dictionary and a Hillsong lyric sheet got married in an LLM.

I (and the blog) may one day regret the name, as one can only imagine Barebone regretted his, but then again maybe not, considering Praise-God named his son “If-Jesus-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Barebone.”

So you never know!

A Few Final Thoughts

This is a universalist blog, but it’s not a systematic theology. I can offer those looking for apologetics only a handful of intuitions, which surely can “prove” nothing3. And besides, I too am figuring it out. Sir Edward Dyer said the firmest faith is in the fewest words; the loosest faith, we can then infer, writes a Substack about it.

So, Universalism, Christian Pantheism, Taoism . . . all of these in the fullness of time.

I do not aim to provoke (fingers crossed?), in fact I hope to open good-faith dialogue with the orthodox, but since provocation is literally inevitable4, I think it’s relevant to quote St. Paul here:

“But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you, haterz, LMAO” (1 Corinthians 4:3, ESV). “In fact, I do not even judge myself!”

So as we go into these songs – and as we contemplate universalism – I try to remember that the first Christian was a thief: one who couldn’t possibly have formulated that Jesus was the son of god who died for his sins.

And in the eleventh hour, I believe the last Christian will be a thief too.

But in the meantime (and every time!) there’s music.